Data centers have become the beating heart of the digital economy – housing mission-critical data and applications that power global businesses. However, traditional manual and siloed data center operations are no longer sustainable, prompting significant interest in automation.
This article will provide an in-depth explainer on data center automation, outline 6 best practices that can drive major efficiency gains, and provide concrete examples of these strategies delivering transformative impact for global firms.
What Are Data Centers & Why is Automation Important?
Data centers are specially designed facilities that organizations use to house enterprise IT infrastructure like servers, storage systems, networking gear and software. They process, organize, backup and distribute data to support key functions.
With data volumes exploding globally, data center workloads are immensely complex involving:
- Infrastructure deployment, upgrades and maintenance
- Ensuring systems availability, business continuity and disaster recovery
- Security policy implementation and access control
- Resource monitoring, optimization and capacity planning
- License and vendor management
Manually managing these disparate tasks across hybrid infrastructure is no longer feasible. Industry surveys reveal that:
- 75% of data center outages are caused by human errors in operations
- 80% of IT budgets are spent "keeping the lights on" via manual tasks
- Outages cost up to $9000 per minute involving revenue losses and damages
Automating data center workflows is thus critical for boosting efficiency, driving significant cost savings and improving resilience.
6 Best Practices for Data Center Automation
Based on proven use cases from Fortune 500 firms and cloud leaders, here are 6 automation best practices that can transform data center ops:
1. APIs for Seamless Cross-Application Integration
Modern firms use specialized applications for infrastructure monitoring, ticket management, cloud cost analytics etc. Manually aggregating data from these siloed apps is time-consuming.
APIs enable seamless interchange of real-time data between platforms – avoiding delays. Automation platforms provide pre-built API connectors so IT teams can easily:
- Stream data from monitoring and helpdesk apps into central dashboards
- Trigger automated actions across applications via API calls
- Reduce reliance on complex point-to-point integration
2. Unified Control Plane for Visibility & Governance
Data centers house sensitive information making them prime targets for internal and external threats. Gaining unified control and complete visibility across hybrid infrastructure is vital for security.
Automation creates a single pane of glass providing:
- Centralized access controls limiting unauthorized system access
- Comprehensive auditing logs to trace user activity
- Unified policies across on-premise, multi-cloud, containers and data centers
Leading firms use automation to enforce least-privilege access delivering security wins.
3. Workload Optimization via Intent-Based Automation
Manual optimization of data center capacity for fluctuating workloads is complex, risk-prone and slower.
Intent-based automation allows defining business intents like:
- Dynamically scale web app capacity by 20% during sales events
- Lower DB costs by 30% every weekend
Automation platforms then interpret these intents and undertake the complex set of activities needed to translate intent into action. This cuts workload management time by 65% as per client examples.
4. Automated Reporting and Metrics for Better Decisions
While most data center monitoring tools provide data, distilling insights is manual. Automated reporting eliminates this time sink.
With templatized reports on availability, uptime, asset utilization etc., teams get contextual insights within minutes helping identify anomalies. Automation also enables complex data correlations that are impossible manually.
5. Keeping Pace with Regulations via Policy Automation
Cybersecurity and data privacy regulations impose heavy compliance burdens on data centers handling sensitive data. Non-compliance risks heavy penalties.
Automation helps address this via:
- Monitoring regulatory websites and publishing changes
- Assessing infrastructure against new rules
- Identifying and remediating compliance gaps based on risk
- Providing audit trails for proofs of compliance
Top firms use compliance automation to accelerate certification and enable innovation without regulatory bottlenecks.
6. Making Strategic Shifts like Cloud Migrations
Digital initiatives like cloud adoption require transforming data centers, which means significant change management.
Automation helps smooth such transitions by:
- Creating execution roadmaps aligning business/IT priorities
- Adding guardrails to minimize disruptions during change
- Automating manual tasks like asset discovery, dependency mapping etc.
- Providing unified visibility across legacy and new environments
Real-World Impact and Results
These automation best practices have demonstrated significant measurable impact across data center landscapes:
- A telecom firm automated over 800 IT processes enabling 75% faster server refresh and 50% reduction in change approval times
- A financial corporation automated vulnerability remediation via APIs realizing 60% quicker security patching
- A healthcare provider gained centralized visibility across 20,000 assets, achieving 99% SLA adherence via automation
- A fast food giant automated license optimization saving 20% in software spends annually
- An insurer automated workload provisioning enabling 2x quicker scaling to meet sales demands
- A software major automated cloud migration playbooks minimizing outages and 50% faster shift
The numbers speak for themselves. While building an automation foundation requires investment, outcomes include major efficiency gains, cost savings and risk reduction over time.
Key Takeaways
Data center automation is indispensable for modernization, boosting resilience and improving competitiveness. CIOs must prioritize:
- API integration for interoperability
- Unified security policy enforcement
- Simplifying complex task orchestration
- Generating insights from operations data
- Compliance policy monitoring and threat remediation
- Smoothing strategic transitions
As showcased via multiple examples, these best practices can drive significant long-term value – making data center automation a vital strategic imperative.
