In today’s IT community, automation is quite a buzzword. We hear about it a lot — from marketing and sales force automation to workload management automation and the automation of software related to business processes. But why is it so important?
Essentially, automation is about taking the traditional computing resources of the business to the next level. It’s about taking manual and labor-intensive processes, and changing them so that they no longer require detailed human intervention. Using principles of technology advancement like machine learning and sophisticated algorithms, vendors can offer companies the ability to automate all sorts of key tasks and processes in all kinds of interesting and useful ways.
Who needs automated tasks?
Just about any system administrator can benefit from the principle of automation. Automating tasks frees up time for key people to turn their attention to other important aspects of running a business.
For example, in a virtualized network environment, someone who was spending their time getting after every detail of virtual machine performance and workload management could instead be looking at the big picture and how to scale the system efficiently, while automation software takes care of those other little details in the background.
For a look at how diverse automation benefits can be, think of someone who is running software or even mechanical hardware processes in a manufacturing business. If there’s a software process leading to production tagging, quality assurance or some other area of a business process, automation can again take that work out of the human manager’s hands and perform it automatically, so that the human worker can go do other things.
Automation tools.
Some of the best automation tools have to do a managing applications in an enterprise environment. A tool called Zapier helps to integrate apps easily, and monitor automated data that flows between them. It helps to provide pre-built processes that can be repeated without reinventing the wheel.
Other tools like IFTTT help automate the process of using applets for Java-based web development. The scope of applications for these types of tools is profound — by connecting this type of automation to Apple, Android or other platforms, human managers get the power of adaptive automation assistance in their back pockets.
Another tool called Stackify also helps human users in a variety of ways. Stackify can help solve application performance issues, find hidden exceptions, or help to synchronize business activities where data resolution is ultimately important.
For example, think about a reservation or booking system or a ticketing system that uses a variety of applications. Companies will be trying to assess how data flows between these applications when scaling. They want product support, and they want an engaged model for fixing bugs and glitches.
In these types of cases, using Stackify Retrace can help make problem-solving more proactive. It’s not just a question of providing notifications when something’s wrong — it’s an overall analysis of the applications as they’re developing, to catch any issues. A principle called DevOps combines the words development and operations — it makes the development process more fluid and agile. It helps to automate some of the processes of bringing applications into full swing. These are the kinds of processes that Stackify supports to offer developers and others more automation assistance.
Companies that are not familiar with this kind of functionality should be thinking about how to integrate automation into business processes. Whether it’s a product or service business, and whether the process relates to manufacturing or customer connections, numerous types of automation can really improve business outcomes.
