When the cloud became part of the conversation among IT teams, it was the promise of significantly lowering data storage costs that caught executives’ attention. As enterprises have increasingly replaced on-site systems and infrastructure with cloud solutions, it’s becoming clear that the real advantages, the kind of changes that transform a business with cloud, come with automation.
When automation is a central goal of cloud adoption, IT teams are able to offload repetitive and manual tasks such as monitoring security logs or completing updates. Instead of requiring members of the IT team to complete these tasks, their talents can be used to address strategic measures to improve productivity or other more complex issues. Here are four ways automation is delivering disruptive benefits to enterprise IT:
Security: With more employees working remotely and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs adding complexity for security teams, automation is an important way to save resources. Automated tools can develop a baseline for normal behaviors, detect anomalies, and then address and remediate the concern, all before a member of the security team is alerted.
One of the key benefits of automation is the ability to scale security policy across a fleet of internet of things (IoT) devices or apply a particular security update across hundreds or thousands of remote workers. With each functioning essentially as a mini-branch of the enterprise, the ability to auto-scale is a way to save both time and budgetary resources.
Networking: Solutions like software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) are a natural fit for automation. SD-WAN uses application awareness to apply connectivity prioritization to deliver the best possible performance across the network. When congestion or latency becomes a threat, SD-WAN automatically reroutes traffic to the next best pathway, without the end user’s awareness.
In the case of SD-WAN, network administrators set business policy to prioritize high-bandwidth transmissions or those requiring real-time connection, and the solution uses these policies to ensure that the most critical traffic receives preferential pathways.
Customer Experience: From using artificial intelligence to predict customers’ buying behaviors, to contact centers equipped with digital agents, automation is improving the customer experience.
Artificial intelligence has allowed automated contact centers to make improvements to the customer experience, with highly conversational digital agents easily navigating customer questions and requests. For any complex topic, the digital agent knows when to transfer the customer to a live agent for further help.
Automation also allows customer behaviors to be accessible for analysis, so that enterprises can suggest additional products, create targeted content, and better understand their market for product and service development.
If you would like more information about how automation might introduce some key advantages for your enterprise, contact us at Cloud Source. We can guide you through the process of identifying your goals for automation and then choosing a solution that fits your requirements and your budget.