What is IT automation?

IT automation simplifies and speeds up operations across multiple areas of IT, including security, application development, cloud infrastructure management, and lots more. It’s become a necessity for modern businesses, and smart AI-powered automation tools add even more efficiency. Here’s what to know about how IT automation can save time and money for technical teams across industries.

What is IT automation?

IT automation refers to the discipline of building software to help remove manual or repeatable tasks from human workers. Even before the advent of AI tools and platforms, IT teams developed methods of IT automation. As IT environments have grown more and more complex, the teams managing and growing them aren’t able to stay ahead of every single task. With geographically dispersed data centers, hybrid cloud architectures, and complicated, often legacy tech stacks, IT teams have to offload infrastructure and component management wherever they can.

IT automation, particularly in the age of AI, is a strategic shift from manual system management to software-driven workflows — orchestrated by humans, but that don’t need human intervention.

IT automation promises time and cost savings to teams that use it, and with generative and agentic AI technology maturing in this space, the potential is huge. IT automation puts processes in place so that software performs work previously done by humans, and can reduce human errors along with boosting productivity. 

Types of IT automation

Some of the common IT tasks that can be automated include data entry, cloud and infrastructure monitoring, patching, IT service management, help desk upkeep, backup and recovery, and application development. 

Types of IT automation include: 

IT process automation

ITPA is any series of processes performed by IT team members that can be standardized and automated, like patching, monitoring, software installation, or help desk ticket management. 

Business process automation

This strategy automates repetitive business-wide operations like order processing, inventory management, new customer acquisition, and common HR and finance tasks.

Orchestration 

While often used interchangeably with IT automation, orchestration refers to the process of establishing workflows, or a set of several tasks, in a cohesive way to improve operational efficiency and scalability. This concept also plays an essential role when building multi-agent AI systems.

Robotic process automation

RPA uses software bots to handle repetitive tasks, using a rules-based approach.

Intelligent automation

This approach combines AI with RPA for a more data-driven type of automation.

Hyperautomation

This type of IT automation aims to encompass as many business and IT processes as possible within its scope. It uses a combination of technologies like AI, machine learning, and RPA to go beyond basic automation and orchestrate complete, complex workflows.

Agentic AI/AIOps

With the quickly growing field of agentic AI, IT automation can become even smarter and more tailored to the work a team is doing. AI and ML boost IT automation to make it even more intelligent, since the tools can learn from previous experiences and other data, then optimize the automation workflows independently. Agentic AI and AIOps are closely related, with agentic AI acting autonomously to solve problems and AIOps using AI to analyze data and offer insights efficiently.

Why use IT automation?

For busy IT teams, automation can be a transformational strategy. It can improve operations dramatically, ensuring speed, consistency, and reliability across the entire digital environment. These are some key benefits of incorporating IT automation into your environment: 

• Streamlined operations: automate routine IT management tasks for users, like providing cloud, software, and device support or speeding up helpdesk ticket resolution
• Added flexibility and agility: the ability to scale up and down and allocate resources to align with demand is essential for modern IT teams. Developers might automatically provision resources or set up configuration workflows for cloud services, for example.
• Better incident management: IT automation can empower IT teams to identify and resolve issues faster
• Time savings: IT workers can spend their time and skills on more valuable tasks when manual tasks are automated
• Better data insights: developers and IT teams can quickly extract insights from cloud services, API endpoints, edge servers, and data sources
• Improved collaboration: automated IT processes can eliminate siloes and easily connect IT departments and workloads
• Stronger security: when processes are automated, there are fewer human errors and thus fewer bugs, errors, or other vulnerabilities brought into the system
• Lower costs: IT automation may require some up-front investment, depending on the infrastructure, but over time businesses save on costs related to teams spending their time on tedious tasks

How IT automation works

Generally, teams implementing IT automation will follow these four steps:

1. Analysis 

Deciding which tasks and processes to automate requires data. Consult with stakeholders to get to know the goals of the IT automation, then assess tasks and see which ones might be a good fit for automation to start. You can review and refine later as needed. 

2. Implementation 

With tasks chosen, set up IT automation by converting tasks into sets of instructions. That might include writing scripts or implementing automation elements, 

3. Integration 

This key phase is when teams can test scripts or other automation setup to ensure the results are as intended. Once a script or other method is validated, it can be integrated into the automation platform or workflow. 

4. Maintenance

Modern automation workflows will need updating as organizations evolve and mature. IT teams should regularly review and update automation elements for best performance.

Common IT automation use cases

IT automation can be applied in many situations where efficiency, scale, and speed are necessary — and use cases will only keep growing as AI automation enters the picture. Here are some common modern IT automation use cases.

IT operations management 

IT management lends itself nicely to IT automation  because IT teams are often busy and resource-limited, and because many functions are repeatable and easy to streamline. Automated IT operations management tools can use AI agents to serve as proxies for the IT team, offering self-service solutions for users encountering common issues. These platforms cover the automation of real-time monitoring, IT ticketing, network discovery, patch management, remote access and troubleshooting, and more.  

Cloud automation

Lots of enterprises today use hybrid cloud architectures, with some workloads running on-premises and others in public cloud environments. Others may run all their key workloads in one or several public cloud infrastructure providers. Getting the most out of the cloud, and ensuring the best use of its resources through careful orchestration, is much easier using cloud automation services to optimize the environment for each workload.

Application deployment automation

This type of IT automation has been in use for many years, as software development requires heavy time and resources from teams. Deployment automation lets developers integrate, test, and deploy code changes automatically, so they can perform product testing faster and speed up software releases. 

Data synchronization automation

This type of IT automation refers to the process of automatically, continuously updating data records so that every system and device across a company has the same information. This saves lots of time previously spent on manual data entry, and has become essential as data volumes increase. Businesses can respond much more quickly to users with speedy synchronizations and minimize data loss or problems caused by duplicate data.

Security automation

Threats to IT security are rampant, and security automation can take a lot of burden off of security teams by automating detection, prevention, analysis, and remediation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. There are many options for enterprises to use security automation strategically, to save time on typical workflows, such as using two-factor authentication, single sign-on, or role-based access control, among others. Security automation can speed up response times and cut down on configuration errors and compliance risks, so that teams can focus on optimizing systems to detect emerging threats.

Tapping into IT automation in the age of AI

AI-driven IT automation is a vast market, and IT teams can take full advantage of ready-to-use IT management platforms like Atera. These types of modern IT automation solutions offer a single platform to handle a range of tasks: streamlining workflows, jobs, and batch processes, including user provisioning and network configuration.

In this category, Robin by Atera, a user self-service tool, offers automated support for users to solve common IT problems on their own, helping them to save time and reducing IT workload by 40%. More complex issues go to technicians, so they can focus their time on more valuable work. Users can use email, Teams, Slack, and the user portal to ask questions and troubleshoot with Robin.

Atera’s AI Copilot serves to automate other parts of the IT team’s workload, like resolving technical issues, monitoring devices, updating patches, and managing helpdesk tickets. Because it’s AI-powered, you can ask it questions in natural language to get answers or suggestions, or to take care of repetitive tasks like creating an instant ticket summary or generating a knowledge base article. And it can resolve issues proactively. 

Atera’s tools can help ease your workload now, and set you up for success as AI agents and humans begin to work in tandem for better user experiences and faster challenge resolutions.