AS today’s data centres face stringent service level and availability requirements, infrastructure complexity and tight resource constraints, companies have begun to recognise the need to invest in strategies that can drive higher availability, automate IT processes, and leverage staff and the infrastructure utilisation.

Woon says the most effective initiatives rely on three key fundamentals: thinking big, starting small, and scaling fast.

However, data centres often rely on scripts to interface their processes and use homegrown programmes for tracking internal requests. These are labour-intensive, fragmented tools and are prime culprits in configuration drift, which causes production downtime.

With process automation, organisations can realise the transformation of automation as a framework to enable dramatic improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of data centre operations.

By standardising policies and processes, organisations can avoid user errors that causes downtime. Also, measuring process metrics allows organisations to reduce operational costs.



Automating storage processes

Process automation tools provide organisations with a service-oriented technology for workflow-enabling, automating, and integrating their storage operations. Single tasks or complex processes can be encapsulated for use and reuse by others across the supply chain.

Users in different organisations can manage their respective portion of an end-to-end process through role-based delegation of policy definition, process definition, and execution control. On-the-fly policy decisions can be delegated to authorised users across the process. Automated processes can be organised and published to reflect the way individuals in the supply chain view their job.

Process automation can ease the security concerns associated with managing IT processes across distributed platforms. It should be managed with the same approach as the line-of-business applications they support. Communications between the automation engine and its managed elements must be encrypted to protect data.

Administrators must be able to manage the state of processes to enable restart, recovery, and rollback. In addition, a system-enforced and user-extensible audit history must be provided which captures the details of user tasks, processes and automation parameters.



Where to begin

It is not surprising that the key practices for successful process automation implementation mirror those in successful business process management deployments.

Whether deployed alone or in parallel with monitoring tools and other traditional approaches to managing processes across the storage chain, the most effective initiatives rely on three key fundamentals: thinking big, starting small, and scaling fast. Organisations select a portion of a single, well-understood process such as on-demand reporting of system status and then begin the cycle of automating, learning, iterating and evolving.

The most important step in process automation implementation is to leverage the knowledge gained to optimise and change practices over time.

Consequently, organisations must evaluate and model process improvements that are made possible through automation. For example, many organisations may find provisioning storage on-demand rather than forecasting and automating helps them avoid unnecessary build-up of over-provisioned storage.

In conclusion, process automation helps organisations improve goals, improves the process to achieve goals and enforce policy compliance, which can speed innovation, support business growth and enable the company to gain a competitive advantage.



The writer is Symantec Malaysia’s general manager.