- Improved capability administration: 22.9%
- Community/software resiliency: 22.6%
- Accelerated incident response (e.g., imply time to perception, imply time to restore): 21.5%
- Elevated/improved collaboration: 21.2%
- Agility (responsiveness to vary and enterprise wants): 18.1%
- Lowered regulatory compliance threat: 17.8%
- Empowering lower-skilled personnel to do extra: 16.7%
- Capital expense avoidance (e.g., extending lifetime of {hardware}, maximizing use of put in tools): 16.7%
- Lowered configuration drift/improved design compliance: 16.7%
- Accelerated time to marketplace for new functions/companies: 16.7%
“On the scale we do issues with hundreds of areas, even doing somewhat factor like working a easy change or command on a community machine is simply an enormous job,” mentioned a community instruments engineer at a Fortune 500 retailer within the EMA report. “Automation simply makes life a lot simpler for folks by way of compliance, gathering config information from units, working studies, and deployment.”
The EMA knowledge additionally debunks the concept that community automation will indirectly substitute IT professionals. In accordance with interviews EMA performed with 10 nameless IT leaders, the fear over automation is mitigated by the advantages automation brings.
“Automation takes human error out of the community. We’ve decreased outages by a major quantity,” mentioned a community automation engineer at a big college within the EMA report. “When folks hit a button to automate one thing, now we have scripts working so many checks earlier than a change is completed. Additionally, we’ve empowered technicians who lack the skillsets to make adjustments and write configs. Subject groups could be made up of individuals with decrease skillsets, who can exit and hit a button to troubleshoot issues.”
Regardless of the advantages reported by 18% of respondents, many enterprise and technical challenges stay. In accordance with the EMA report, IT management points (buy-in, route, dedication) had been cited by greater than 31% of IT leaders. Multiple-fourth (26.8%) of the respondents pointed to staffing points corresponding to abilities gaps and workers churn as a enterprise problem.
“Essentially the most difficult factor for me is the dearth of community engineers who can contribute to automation,” mentioned a community engineer at a midmarket enterprise companies firm within the EMA report. “The group is small, and it’s arduous to search out individuals who can assist you clear up an issue.”
One other 25% pointed to finances points as a ache level, and practically one-fourth cited conflicts/collaboration points between teams (e.g., NetOps, DevOps, SecOps). Safety coverage constraints had been additionally reported by practically 25% of respondents. Different challenges embrace problem with prioritizing particular use instances for automation (18.6%), unclear enterprise worth for funding (16.9%), stakeholder buy-in, engineers resist utilizing automation (16.4%), and buyer help limitations (16.4%).
