Automation can offer some very tangible benefits that managed service providers (MSPs) can offer to IT departments.
A study by 451 Research found that while 52% of those surveyed report increased reliability and consistency and another 45% see increased security, there are still too many enterprises that still aren’t sold on automation.
In this video with 451 Research, Stan Stevens, director of software product management at Hitachi Vantara, said organizations have three main challenges around automation:
First, most have a mix of people who embrace automaton on one side, and a fair amount of people who are bucking the trend and running from automation. Second, people are concerned about the return on investment. If the company automates, will it impact the bottom line in any significant way? Finally, IT managers are concerned about the impact automation will have on the staff. Will automation really produce what it promises, they wonder: the ability to reduce manual tasks and leave hard-pressed and hard-to-come-by IT staff to do more high-level work.
“Customers tell us to ‘stop,’ that they have too many tools and they have all these data points coming at them,” said Stevens. “They need a way to cut though all the false positives so they can get to the root cause of the issue. While we are a storage vendor and storage company, we are trying to help our customers with an integrated management platform that ties the analytics across the organization so the IT team has the information they need to find out what’s really causing outages and performance issues and help to automate that very quickly.”
Stevens said Hitachi Vantara offers an Automator Starter Pack that has built-in templates and tutorials that help customers identify which one or two processes they can automate on the back-end. Hitachi Vantara works with MSPs and their customers to install the software and then deploy the two automated workflows. Examples of automated workflows include rapid provisioning of storage for VMware ESXi hosts, or SAN zoning.
“We have one customer where it could have taken them up to four hours to provision a new logical unit number (LUN), but through the automated processes they got it done in 20 minutes,” said Stevens. “We can help save labor costs, which lets customers take that money and put it back into the organization.”
At a time when 451 Research reports than more than half of enterprises face infrastructure-centric skills shortages, that’s precisely the targeted results from automation that MSPs can offer their IT customers.