Slow manual tasks, the risk of error, and security problems: three issues why automation can be the magic bullet for your service desk.
Businesses increasingly use technology to improve the performance of IT service desks. However, many are still not packing the kind of punch businesses need. To create systems which really deliver, businesses need to add a pinch of automation.
Here are 3 problems with conventional approaches which could push you to automate your service desk.
1. Disconnected systems
Although customers have service desk software and automation software, they are often kept separate, never talking to each other. This is an enormous wasted opportunity which leads to increased time to delivery and errors. Provisioning IT becomes a long and painful process forcing IT teams to undertake multiple repetitive tasks.
2. Excessive manual processes
IT teams find themselves bogged down on multiple manual steps. This firstly increases the amount of time processes take, but more importantly leads to inevitable errors and misconfigurations. Humans are fallible, but all the more so when processes are mundane and repetitive.
When employees are forced to go through multiple mundane and repetitive tasks, concentration can diminish and the risks of error increase. The more steps in these processes there are, the more opportunities exist for errors.
3. Security weaknesses
These errors create security vulnerabilities through misconfiguration of privileges, multiple unauthorized accounts or the possibility of non sanctioned configuration changes which create snowflake servers.
When provisioning manually, companies get no feedback mechanism from deployed systems to the service desk. Addressing performance or security concerns is typically highly manual and companies logging, alerting and homegrown integration back to the service desk.
Alerting integration back to service desks can also be extremely noisy, generating multiple tickets and false positives which IT teams have to sort through.
The solution
The missing piece of the puzzle is in automation. According to research from SnapLogic 90% of employees are bogged down by mundane tasks which could be automated. Companies are catching on. According to Gartner, the market for hyper automation enabling software will reach $596.6bn in 2022 up from $532.4 billion this year as businesses start to automate virtually every available corner of their business operations.
This is a fast moving process. Businesses will need to move swiftly to keep up with the pace of development. One quick win could be found by combining two key pieces of Software: ServiceNow and Ansible.
ServiceNow is the digital workforce application designed to help businesses implement more effective digital workflows. The company has thrived since its launch in 2004, but as enterprises embrace digital technology it has really come into its own during the past year or so.
Its Q2 results for this year show revenues of $1.41bn – a 31.6% year on year increase.
Ansible, meanwhile, delivers simple IT automation which reduces repetitive tasks and frees up DevOps teams to focus on more productive duties. Data from a study run by Forrester shows the gains it can bring including:
· Reduction in delivery lead times by 66%.
· A reduction in the time staff spend patching issues by 80%.
· Security incidents reduced by 94%.
According to the data, one Red Hat customer saved 48,000 hours of staff time by automating the process of bringing servers online.
Bringing the two together can solve many of the problems businesses face. ServiceNow can be used as a single source of truth for all IT assets while Ansible can be used to automatically open, close and update service requests, address problems, change requests and investigate incidents.
Reducing the burden of mundane and administrative tasks also goes a long way to improving job satisfaction which makes it easier to recruit and retain the best staff. According to a study from Oxford University, employees who feel happier and more fulfilled in their work are up to 13% more productive than those who are not.
It can also improve security by making it quicker and easier to detect and resolve issues. With ServiceNow to Ansible integration, Ansible can use tools such as Red Hat Smart management with insight to detect issues with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating systems. They will either be able to heal them automatically or generate tickets for IT teams to manually intervene and remediate.
At the same time, it also allows teams to retain a sense of manual control. One concern over automation is that it removes the ability to maintain oversight. With this combination teams can get the best of both worlds enabling self-service and enforcing configuration and security policies. However, if systems drift, Ansible can detect the problem and bring them back into compliance.
Conclusion
Automation at the service desk level, then, will be much more important to the future of businesses than many realize. They will see the benefits in faster service delivery, improved customer satisfaction, reduced errors and improved productivity across the entire IT team.
Aside from reducing errors it delivers a closed loop system which automatically updates and frees staff up for other tasks. As such it delivers value at both ends of the pipeline. Namely, it saves money while creating opportunities to drive more revenue into the business.
Making this work, however, can be challenging. If you are feeling overwhelmed and unsure where to start, Stone Door Group offers our ServiceNow to Ansible Accelerator℠ which is a turnkey software and services offering that delivers all the required automation integration between ServiceNOW and Ansible. To get an overview of our solution, register here for one of our Ansible Executive Use Case Roundtable virtual events where a panel of Ansible experts provide next steps to Ansible customer use cases.
About the Author
Darren Hoch is a Managing Partner for Stone Door Group, an IBM and Red Hat Apex partner, that specializes in enterprise DevOps cloud engineering solutions. Stone Door Group helps enterprises of all sizes with their digital transformation initiatives. To talk to Darren and learn more how Stone Door Group can help, drop us a line at: letsdothis@stonedoorgroup.com.
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https://www.stonedoorgroup.com/zero-to-code-ansible-accelerator
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