IT Challenges: When to Lean on Automation 

In every business, there are repetitive processes that take valuable time away from supporting growth or, worse, lead to burned out IT staff, frustrated employees and unhappy customers. The first step is to identify where these repetitive processes live in IT, which could be:

• Deploying new devices, operating systems or patches
• Tracking or managing software licenses
• Setting up and verifying the integrity of encryption and other security layers
• Deploying applications based on specific user roles 
• Responding to help desk tickets/troubleshooting

Occam’s razor informs us that the simplest solution tends to be the correct one. In IT, automation is as simple as it gets. Look to automate as many repetitive or time-consuming processes, ideally leveraging as few solutions as possible to get there. Thankfully, we now have options such as zero-touch deployment and unified endpoint management that allow IT to provision and manage devices and applications based on users and roles, rather than by isolated device types.

Automation also applies to application self-healing, ensuring that critical applications remain installed and correctly configured, whether they are removed or corrupted unintentionally or maliciously. This automated application integrity provides the continued health and performance of devices needed to improve employee uptime and reduce IT support tasks.

Tim Williams is vice president of global marketing and product strategy at FileWave, whose 20-plus years in multi-platform endpoint management and endpoint security includes leading global sales, marketing and product management teams at Netopia, Altiris, Symantec and HEAT Software, among others.