For Government IT Professionals, Automation is Your Friend

By Joe Kim, SolarWinds Chief Technology Officer

Government IT workers get a little squeamish on occasion. Understandable, right? I mean, federal IT managers must stay on top of the latest tech, which is constantly evolving. Legacy technologies are being replaced with shiny new cloud, virtualization, and networking software. Network complexity continues to grow, and budget and security concerns are always prevalent.

Underlying all of that may even be a sense of uncertainty regarding job security, some of which may stem from automation software. Don’t fret. Automation is your friend, and it can be used effectively to eliminate wasted time and unnecessary headaches.

Creating Their Legacy, Driving Innovation

Those should be comforting words for today’s federal IT professionals, who tend to have their fingers in a lot of pies. Beyond simply managing the network, growing network complexity, and initiatives like DevOps, have given administrators far more responsibility than ever before.

Today’s IT professionals can’t afford to be burdened with manual interventions that require hours – sometimes days – to fix. Furthermore, many like the idea of having time to do things that will help advance their agencies’ technology agendas, and create their own legacy.

Alert! Let’s Automate Responses!

Who wants to have to manually react to every single alert that comes through? Who has the time?

There’s a better way of dealing with alerts, one that won’t take hours away from your day.

Let’s take a look at a simple example. When a server alert is created because a disk is full, an administrator would typically deal with that task manually, perhaps by dumping the temp directory. What if they wrote a script for this task, instead. That would eliminate the need for a manual intervention?

Here’s another one. For whatever reason, an application stops working. Again, manually dealing with this challenge can be a painstaking, time-consuming process. Automation allows managers to write a script that enables the application to automatically restart.

Administrators can also evaluate their alerts to determine if an automated response is scriptable. This could create far fewer headaches.

Perhaps even more importantly, automated responses could free up IT time to develop and deploy new and innovative applications, for instance, or find better ways to deliver those applications to users.

Tools for the Job

Speaking of tools, there are certain types that should be considered. Change management and tracking, compliance auditing, and configuration backups should be on everyone’s automated wish list.

These tools save time and resources and greatly reduce errors that are sometimes created by manual tasks. These errors can lead to network downtime or potential security breaches. Meanwhile, they help to free up time for projects that can help your agency become more agile and innovative.

There are ways IT professionals can manage the hand they’re dealt more effectively and efficiently. They can use automation to make their lives easier and their agencies more nimble and secure. In turn, they can work smarter, not harder.

Find the full article on GovLoop.