IT-organizations around the world face constant pressure to do more, do it faster and with fewer resources. They are seen as cost centers and as such benchmarked against the performance of nimbler competitors and the public cloud providers.
IT-organizations feel that pressure from multiple sources at the same time. The CFO compares his internal IT-budgets with the costs of public cloud offerings and demands comparable savings. The lines of business know they can get the latest applications and platforms within minutes in the public cloud and complain about the slowness of their internal IT department. And the end-users expect continuous availability of all IT-services. Add Moore’s law to describe the growth in scale and complexity of the IT infrastructure, and it becomes understandable why CIOs have the shortest tenure of all C-level executives.
At CFEngine we frequently meet companies that save millions of dollars annually as result of working with our tools.
In addition to improved productivity and increased quality of service, automation will make your IT-operations more cost effective. Actually, in order to stay competitive, I would argue that highly automated IT-operations is the only way for IT-organizations to meet the agility and cost requirements of today.
Automate or die
IT-operations that are not highly automated will not be able to keep up with expected productivity, quality of service and costs.
Automation of IT-operations can lead to fantastic productivity gains, increased quality of service and reduced operational costs. But what about the people, and their jobs?
System Administrators will not become obsolete, but the nature of their work often changes in highly automated environments. The ones who adapt typically enter into more proactive roles. The ones who willingly or unwillingly are left behind, end up fighting fires and home made scripts, until they will eventually be replaced. This evolution should not be viewed as a threat, but as an opportunity.
Software developers know that quality of software projects tend to deteriorate over time unless strong measures are taken to prevent this. Software entropy accelerates once the beginning of “software rot” has been allowed to set in, so the trick is to keep the software as clean as possible at all times. This is referred to as “The Broken Windows Theory” because the pattern is similar to what police departments learned about maintaining order in inner cities: fix the small things all the time, and so keep out the big problems.
