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In today’s time we hear about automation in IT and automating almost everything. But what does that really mean and how can organizations and IT professionals benefit from it? So let’s dive in and give some insights into this hot topic.

What is Automation in IT ?

Automation is a term for technology applications where human input is minimized. This includes business process automation (BPA), IT automation, personal applications such as home automation and more. With this said lets see some of the advantages of automation.

Why Automate or why is Automation a good thing?

Automation helps businesses to be able to predict which customer behaviors will persist at a certain period in time. You can use automation to control how you manage the experiences you create for your customers. Automation, especially when combined with AI, can help you fix or refine these experiences, resulting in higher sales, better use of resources and greater customer satisfaction.
Furthermore, automating your IT systems and automating business applications saves costs. And this is because it takes away the human error factor that comes with manually capturing data. It eliminates rework and time waste in fixing errors. As we all know it costs more to fix an error than to do it right the first time! It also means that you pay less on resources that you need to manage your infrastructure. One will argue if that will cause unemployment or at the very least people will get replaced by these so-called automated processes and machines. But well we will get to that in a bit.

Tools or resources that are used in IT Automation:

There are several tools and resources out there today that can automate IT processes and systems as well. There is Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt stack just to mention a few. Let’s take Ansible for instance and see how it has helped me as an IT professional to automate a system I have automated manual processes using Ansible and this has given me the peace of mind I need to know that when there is a failure at any of my clients systems I am notified and a new system will be deployed without me intervening. That’s cool right?
Read more about Ansible and find out how it can help you in your automation journey.

LET’S ADDRESS THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: Will automation replace humans or like some will say will the robots replace humans?

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Well the short answer to that is YES and NO. The long answer would be that as much as automation is designed to replace manual processes, we can confidently say that this is all setup by humans;a whole division in IT was born through this movement. So don’t worry about your job, because at the time of writing there is already a shortage of devops engineers and there will always be a need for good DevOps engineers. As a professional your life will be a lot easier and you can focus on the more important and pressing needs. Isn’t that great news?
Believe me when I say there is more to come in the automation space; we are hearing of DevSecOps now and God knows what other Dev (fill in the Blank) Ops will be born. So with that said there will always be the need for professionals to set up these automations.

The edge of automation

So in conclusion what do we take from all of this? – Being a DevOps Engineer myself, with over 10 years of experience I can say that automation can do a lot of good both for a Devops engineer as for an IT professional. This is because these skills are highly in demand as more and more companies are adopting Automations. And for businesses, adoption of automation will give the business the edge to thrive in this day and age. I say automate the repetitive tasks so you don’t have to do it manually every day. Your life will be a lot easier. Also it gives you the time to focus on more important and pressing needs. As a business it will help you to be online at times that your customers really need you to.

Who Am I?

I am Abdul Razak and I am a seasoned DevOps Engineer who enjoys taking the complications out of every IT situation and making it robust, scalable and simple. I love to Automate Processes so a business can have the peace of mind they need. You can reach out to me if you have a complex IT issues and needs it automated and simplified.