Future-proofing data management with automation

Today, automation has landed firmly on every industry’s doorstep and prompted those in charge of digital transformation projects to consider how best to use these technologies. With 76% of businesses using automation for daily workflows in 2022, a core business priority is its effective application to data management.

Why? Data is growing in volume, importance, and variety at a startling speed, and with the risk of cyberattacks rising by the day, it has never been more important to manage and protect data systems as efficiently as possible. Moreover, fragmented data storage across organisations adds an extra layer of complexity to this challenge.

In order to future-proof data storage, IT managers need to learn how to upskill their teams by using the latest technologies. Embracing automation to effectively manage corporate data will initiate a streamlined data surface, the utilisation of risk mitigation tools, and the maintenance of modern innovations to ‘do more with less’.

Creating an efficient data surface eliminates unnecessary and cumbersome storage systems as well as ensuring complete visibility of sensitive data that is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Using automated systems that work cohesively will ultimately make challenging combinations of mainframes, client-server architectures, virtualisation, cloud containers, microservices, and SaaS redundant.

With adaptability comes efficiency

With this in mind, you may ask: where does automation fit into an organisation with skilled and capable employees?

The key idea for IT teams to consider is that automation is not simply replacing human intelligence, it is enhancing it. Automation is an essential tool for any modern-day IT professional who wishes to work seamlessly, efficiently, while mindful of cost, energy, and risk. Having a wide view of a company’s data landscape is essential to ensure complete security, especially given the fact that data-protected copies are now a surety that organisations can rely on in a crisis. Adding automation to daily operations is a powerful way to support employees and allow them to do more strategic work.

How can automation minimise risk?

Automation is also a powerful tool to mitigate risk. Disaster Recovery Orchestration (DRO) and automotive compliance reporting are perfect methods to exemplify the role automation can play in IT management.

DRO uses a thorough procedural guide, or a runbook, assembled to deal with fallback operations, and planned and unplanned failovers. This approach dramatically minimises the risk of downtime and data loss, as well as reducing the chance of human error. The runbook is used to automate the steps for failover and failback operations, triggering the application with one click and ensuring that the required stages are done in the correct order.

A different process applies to an unplanned failover. Such events take businesses by surprise, and there is no time to trigger an incremental backup. An automated structure will minimise any damage caused by this. Combining DRO with automation builds a well-oiled machine for reducing risk and protecting businesses from the worst-case scenario.

How can automation reduce costs?

In current times, reducing unnecessary expenses is a priority for every organisation, and providing solutions that are efficient and straightforward is vital. Automation allows for this, offering a unified experience that combines AI and machine learning to utilise cloud-based services in a cost-effective way. Computer resources is a perfect example of this at work. Disaster recovery costs can also be made simpler with automation, through cloud-native solutions integration. By implementing these technologies, businesses can avoid unnecessary costs, which are often related to static cloud wastage. This guarantees a focused and profitable view of data management.

Adopting automation in a way that suits the needs of a company is paramount and allows for flexibility in spending. Managing existing and future workloads, as well as compute nodes, is possible in an automotive application. Therefore, businesses can guarantee that they are making the most use of their cloud usage, which leads to a cost-effective data management model.

The widespread use of cloud technology has triggered a shift, challenging how companies approach data management and transformation. The pay-as-you-go capabilities of cloud services save time and money and allow businesses to customise their services to their own scale, acting as an excellent money-saver across the board.

Automation is here to stay

With its ability to create a smooth-running process where employees can work beyond the cumbersome administrative work, avoid risk, and reduce costs, automation has earned its place in the modern day. Practising disaster recovery and automated identification in any organisation is an underappreciated vitality, as well as implementing automated compliance reporting and the remediation of important data. In a data-reliant world, data management must become more sophisticated in order to ensure the security of sensitive information, and automation is the answer.