APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 3 covers automation.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

SELF-LEARNING

IT Operations should move towards "self-learning, self-intelligent and self-remediation" tools more and more, and move away from human involved decisions and executions. This approach requires detection and remediation at the source systems itself. The traditional method of letting the source systems generate alerts on threshold breaches and an external system remediate them may not yield the desired results.
Chandramouleswaran Sundaram
SVP and Head, Infrastructure Services, GAVS Technologies

AUTOMATION

The global pandemic has exposed the need for IT and operations to be able to do more with less. With fewer resources and a smaller margin of error, they are being pressured to deliver robust digital services to both their customers and employees. To meet these needs, automation will become an essential part of IT operations. Automation is no longer a nice-to-have; but a matter of survival. In the past, organizations may have been skeptical about automating their work. But the massive spike in demand for IT services as a result of the pandemic has put increased pressure on traditional IT teams. The only way to scale and deliver new services that are critical to the business is to adopt continuous automation. Automation must be continuous because entity maps and baselines need to be updated continuously — everything needs to be automatically watched, analyzed, and adjusted 24x7. By automating manual-intensive, repetitive tasks, ITOps teams can always stay ahead of rapidly changing customer demands. As a result, they'll also have more time to focus on innovating the customer experience which is especially key in industries, such as retail, where business is taking place mainly online amid the shift to virtual.
Andi Grabner
DevOps Activist, Dynatrace

There's no question that the "new normal" will need to deliver more agile support for remote workers. And this is putting an increasing burden on ITOps teams. In fact, our recent research shows that for 63% of IT professionals, IT workloads have increased 37% since going remote. The best way to cope is to embrace solutions that empower employees to become more self-reliant and deliver hyper-automation. Technology that delivers hyper-automation will allow IT to scale and handle the additional challenges. AI, machine learning and automation bots that will self-heal devices, predict and\or proactively fix issues before they occur will dramatically alleviate IT Ops drain.
Rex McMillan
Principal Product Manager, Ivanti

Read Rex McMillan's recent blog on APMdigest: Hyper-Automation - IT's Path to Edge Self-Reliance

IT Ops teams should automate as much as possible. As remote work becomes more normalized, even after the pandemic, IT Ops becomes more difficult — endpoints are no longer easily accessible, yet keeping employees productive remains a priority. Automating necessary tasks, such as patching and fixing endpoint problems, enables employees to work at a high level and frees up time for other IT tasks.
Jeff Harrell
VP of Marketing, Adaptiva

Covid-19 has caused IT priorities to shift. ITOps must now focus on supporting remote workforces, dealing with Zoom, setting up at-home solutions, and so on. But while IT pressures may have changed, business pressures have not; revenue, market share, time to market, and all the traditional metrics of success remain the same. As a result, the need for automation in IT operations has never been greater. Automation helps IT focus on their new priorities while still accommodating for the agility the business demands. When IT can optimize as many processes as possible with automatic, policy-driven workflows, the need for manual intervention and monitoring is eliminated in many areas.
Jeff Kukowski
CEO, CloudBolt

IT automation will play a critical role in the new normal as teams continue to accommodate a dispersed workforce and manage unprecedented service desk pressure. For example, self-service and virtual agent technologies can help offset these workloads by helping to address common issues to boost productivity and free manual labor resources for more complicated issues.
Arun Balachandran
Sr. Marketing Manager, ManageEngine

SELF-SERVICE

Technologies that give the user the power to work more autonomously through self-service will also improve productivity and resilience in this new remote working normal.
Rex McMillan
Principal Product Manager, Ivanti

ITOps can create a catalog of the resources and services that developers need to be productive, and make them easily available with the click of a button. Not only is self-service powered by automation significantly more efficient, but it also reduces unnecessary expenses and cloud cost surges.
Jeff Kukowski
CEO, CloudBolt

THE HYBRID IT PROFESSIONAL

While no one is sure what the new normal will look like, one thing is certain — the world has been cast into the future with alarming speed and accelerated dependence on technology from an individual, enterprise and societal use case. To adapt, the lines between ITOps, Development and Security have to blur, giving rise to the multi-skilled hybrid IT Professional. In the spirit of Site Reliability Engineering, ITOps must adopt an engineering mindset, have a sound understanding of agile software development and groom basic coding skills. The hybrid IT Professional of the new normal enables the creation of Hybrid Product Teams that are multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary and have deep and broad skills. In an effort to work towards advancing the humans of IT through an understanding of the must-have skill sets, please participate in the 2021 Upskilling Survey.
Jayne Groll
CEO, DevOps Institute

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 4