The future of IT automation
The future of IT automation
IT automation is hardly a new idea, but the technology is still in its formative stages. Even the most full-featured tools depend on an IT professional or team to develop and maintain discrete automation elements, such as scripts, templates, policies and workflows.
IT automation will progress to act with greater intelligence and autonomy. IT automation platforms are likely to rely heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. For example, an automation tool can synthesize data on configurations, performance and other information across an IT deployment and process these inputs to discover a normal system operations benchmark, a deviation from which would trigger corrective actions. IT automation systems imbued with AI insights theoretically lessen the importance of deliberate, human-made automation rules, relying instead on autonomous choices guided by high-level business cost and compliance requirements.
Process automation, robotic process automation and service automation
IT automation is a broad term, often conflated or bound together with business task automation. An automated IT workflow can accomplish a strictly IT task, such as provisioning additional storage to a VM, or a business task, such as creating a new user account on the corporate email system.
Process automation improves workflows, typically in factories and other settings, where the same task or series of tasks occurs repeatedly.
