Automation makes a world of difference in almost any process. IT operations are no different. So if your team is struggling with errors, outages, system reliability, or an ever-growing list of manual tasks, you need automation.
But automation won't just keep your team sane. It'll also reduce your company's IT costs and help you scale your systems as you grow.
But where should you start? What should you automate? This post will look at the top 5 tasks you can automate to make your IT processes and teams more productive.
Let's dive in!
Let's think about what happens when a company hires a new employee:
An employee is scheduled to start on Monday. The IT team must create and set up all the accounts by Friday.
Sure, it's straightforward if the employee only uses one or two tools. But does that ever really happen? The average employee uses about 35 different applications for their work today.
Setting up these accounts unnecessarily strains the company's IT team.
(This is particularly painful for larger companies that regularly hire more employees.)
If you automate your IT employee onboarding, you can save a lot of time and - of course - money. But money isn't the only perk; automating account creation and setup allows you to get new IT hires up to speed faster. It also makes for a more pleasant onboarding experience, which has been proven to affect retention.
Ultimately, you'll increase your productivity while enhancing your security.
Let's face it; many employees don't stay in the same position they were initially hired for. They move up, to a different team or transition out of your company.
When roles change, everything changes:
All of this ends up giving the IT team a colossal headache. They need to be involved and implement the changes. In some cases, identity management could be as simple as resetting an employee's password.
Still, it will take time, and IT teams would rather use these resources elsewhere.
For example, password resets make up between 20% to 50% of all helpdesk calls. The average cost of a password reset is about $70.
Based on the above, getting one helpdesk call per day would amount to between $280 and $700 per month spent on password resets alone.
And that’s not even considering the other identity management processes.
If you automate identity management or even just password reset processes, your teams will be more productive, and your company will save a lot of money.
IT teams perform vast amounts of monitoring daily to ensure that a company’s systems run smoothly. Preventive diagnostics is the only way they can detect, identify, and rectify issues before they become bigger problems.
For example, a company's devices, operating systems, and software generate a massive amount of log data that contains valuable system information.
IT teams can take corrective action based on this information if an issue occurs.
Likewise, file monitoring is one of the critical tasks IT teams need to perform to ensure data integrity and consistency.
However, manually monitoring files and systems and studying logs is not viable, if not impossible. Fortunately, automation can streamline these processes, allowing IT teams to create automated workflows that help them identify any issues and take corrective action quicker.
In turn, this reduces unnecessary outages and increases system uptime and reliability.
Several system management tasks are not necessarily complicated but still take IT teams significant time. This includes everything from service restarts to shutting down remote computers and freeing up disk space on servers.
Luckily, automation can streamline these tasks and free up IT teams’ time to focus on more critical aspects of system management.
For example, when there are any system crashes or changes in configuration files, IT teams can use simple scripts to restart services without requiring any intervention and, in the process, save countless hours.
In fact, predictive maintenance can reduce the risk of downtime by up to 90%.
Likewise, teams can use simple automation workflows to free up disk space on servers. You'll see fewer server crashes and downtime without the resource cost of doing it manually.
If you want your software to be up-to-date and perform like a well-oiled machine, your IT team needs to tackle patch management tasks.
By regularly installing patches and updates on systems, IT teams can correct any bugs in the software, improve security, and improve uptime by ensuring that the software is always up-to-date. These patches also allow IT teams to introduce new features into software and ensure compliance for companies that must comply with specific standards.
The problem is that most patch management tools lack customization options that could make them more efficient. Automation can help IT teams customize their patch management workflows and automate specific parts of the process.
If one of the pesky tasks your IT team has to handle includes taking screenshots, you can easily automate it. Regardless of your team’s framework, APIs like ScreenshotAPI take programmatic screenshots of as many websites as you need them to.
Monitor your uptime, keep an eye on competitors, or simply take regular screenshots for compliance or archiving purposes. The options are endless!
Automating your critical IT processes kills multiple birds with one stone:
These 5 tasks are only a primer of the daily headache-inducing obstacles IT teams see, but there are plenty more you could automate away. Start by talking to your team and identifying their bottlenecks.
Then, automate away!
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If screenshot-taking is one of the tasks your team is struggling with, check out ScreenshotAPI. Your team will easily monitor trends, compliance, and uptime with programmatic screenshots. Get started for free!
