Scale: it’s a boon or a scourge, depending on how you look at it. For most startups, scaling into the big leagues is the end goal. For networks, scaling traffic and usage (and monetization) is the heart of the business case. And for enterprises, hockey-stick growth is music to the ears of the C-suite.
But in many cases, scale represents the bane of the IT department’s existence, as they struggle to expand fulfillment processes and manage outsized volumes of workflows that once could be entirely governed (and governed well) by a dedicated group of human brains. At scale, endpoints don’t get patched, systems are overloaded, to-do lists and stress grow, and applications don’t work together. Ultimately, things break down.
According to Jeramiah Dooley, a cloud solutions architect at SolidFire, implementing automation early is the key to enabling systems and processes to function optimally as growth begins to snowball.
“This journey to scale is seldom easy and rarely comes without many, many things breaking along the way,” he said in a blog. “Systems that work well a dozen at a time struggle to operate by the thousands. [But] the process of automation forces understanding and discipline.”
Benefits are of course myriad. Clearly, driving out “swivel-chair” processes that require a human to enter information from one system into another in order to complete a workflow is inefficient and results in bottlenecks. And, humans doing menial, point-solution tasks cost money, bluntly put.
“People are expensive,” Dooley said. “Manual processes are slow, and the people that carry them out are expensive to the business. Automation that scales can drive more productivity from staff, allowing them to contribute more to the overall business than they would otherwise.”
Automation also engenders job value within the workforce. Instead of being confined to traditional technology silos, IT staff can make automation work for them, so that they can take a bigger-picture look at multiple systems and technologies in order to assure that the entire apparatus is serving the overall needs of the business.
There’s also a quality assurance and accountability aspect to automation, Dooley noted.
“As people have to do more tasks in less time, the quality of those tasks goes down,” Dooley said. “Rather than adding in a quality assurance process to ensure that the humans did the job right, automation replaces how those tasks are done the first time. Predictable results cut down on rework and mistakes, making the business operate faster and smoother.”
Also, by automating a process, everyone involved can see exactly how that process is handled, why, and who is responsible for all of the components. “Every automated task will have outside mechanisms that need to be managed (approvals, rejections, follow-up, etc.),” Dooley explained, “and an automated process leaves no room for misunderstanding as to what part a specific person plays.”
In terms of implementation, enterprises should recognize that not everything can or should be set up to function on its own. So, the first task in getting ready for scale should be gaining good visibility into what processes are being done manually now, and then evaluating which ones should be converted.
Once that’s accomplished, modularity and a horizontal view to automation become best practices. Automating horizontal practices across multiple technologies, business units, deployment platforms and environments has far more value to the business, Dooley noted, because it allows a holistic view.
“Complexity is everywhere,” said Dooley. “Enterprises have more options than ever for running workloads to support their business. Should they run on a public cloud, like Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) or Microsoft Azure? Should they run on a private cloud hosted internally? How much input needs to be collected to provision a workload properly?”
If done correctly, he concluded, automation becomes a differentiator. “Reusable, modular, disciplined automation, managed by a team of agile technologists can be a secret weapon,” Dooley said. “By leveraging flexibility and scale, attacking new challenges becomes a key differentiator and competitive advantage to IT.”
Edited by Rory J. Thompson