Modern IT environments are exploding in complexity. IDC predicts 175 zettabytes of data will be created worldwide by 2025. For IT teams, this rapid growth makes manual management of systems and processes unsustainable. Event-driven automation has emerged as a critical technique for IT organizations to operate efficiently in the face of unrelenting complexity.
Event-driven automation involves continuously capturing system and application events, analyzing them, and automatically triggering actions like workflows, policy changes, and alerts based on those events. This allows IT teams to proactively manage infrastructure and applications versus reacting manually after incidents occur.
Here are 4 compelling use cases showing how event-driven automation will shape the future of IT operations:
1. Agile Incident Response and Remediation
Dealing with unplanned IT outages and incidents remains highly challenging today. According to LogicMonitor‘s 2022 State of IT Infrastructure Report, 83% of IT professionals surveyed reported experiencing unexpected outages monthly or more frequently. Lengthy delays detecting and mitigating incidents result in lower service availability, lost revenue, and reduced productivity.
Event-driven automation radically accelerates how quickly IT teams can respond to incidents and disruptions. By automatically detecting failures and triggering automated playbooks, issues can be resolved before significantly impacting end users and the business.
For example, Netflix leveraged event-driven automation and machine learning to instantly rollback problematic code deployments. Algorithms continuously analyze event data from systems to identify performance anomalies indicative of incidents. Once detected, workflows immediately roll back code changes to rapidly restore service availability. This has prevented thousands of hours per month of user-impacting incidents.
Other outcomes organizations have realized include:
- 60-80% faster recovery from incidents via automated playbooks
- 90% reduction in reported failures via auto-remediation
- 99.99%+ service availability ensured through rapid incident response
2. Boost IT Productivity via Intelligent Task Automation
IT professionals spend inordinate amounts of time on repetitive, routine tasks like password resets, provisioning cloud resources, or patching systems. Surveys indicate these rote chores consume 25% or more of IT staff time. This constant distraction strains budgets and inhibits innovation.
Event-driven automation allows IT departments to intelligently automate these mundane tasks. Workflows triggered by events like new employee onboarding can automatically provision new laptops and email accounts without IT involvement. Password resets can be handled via self-service workflows rather than manual help desk tickets.
According to Gartner, intelligent automation techniques including event-driven automation can reduce IT operations costs by up to 30% within the next two years. This dramatically lowers costs while freeing up IT staff time to pursue more strategic efforts.
3. Maintain Continuous Compliance and Security
For heavily regulated industries like finance, healthcare, energy, and government, compliance is an immense challenge. Hundreds of internal policies and external regulations must be continuously monitored and enforced. Non-compliance exposes organizations to major financial fines and reputational damage.
Event-driven automation enables continuous compliance by programmatically detecting policy violations or security events and immediately triggering appropriate responses. Security tools like SIEMs generate billions of event data points that can be analyzed in real-time using this approach. Automated responses can instantly isolate compromised systems to limit damage from attacks.
At ScaleFT, event-driven automation reduced the time to identify and disable compromised credentials from 4 hours down to under 60 seconds. By promptly responding to threats, damages and costs were minimized.
Forrester Research estimates that on average, a single breach costs $4.24 million in damages. Event-driven automation not only reduces breach impact but also demonstrates due diligence to regulators.
4. Break Down Tool Silos with Seamless Orchestration
Most enterprises use a diverse array of monitoring, management, and analytics tools across their IT environments. These tools are often siloed, resulting in fragmented data, visibility, and manual processes. This makes end-to-end automation across the toolchain difficult.
Event-driven automation serves as a connective tissue integrating workflows across disparate tools. Standard event buses and publish-subscribe architectures allow tools to seamlessly interoperate using normalized event data schemas.
For example, availability events from an APM tool can trigger auto-scaling actions by an infrastructure management tool. Security events from a SIEM may automatically enrich events in an ITSM. This enables end-to-end automation across fragmented toolsets.
Leading platforms like HashiCorp Consul and tools like Kafka broker provide an event-driven backbone to break down automation silos. Workflows become transparently connected across tools. Teams gain unified visibility and can automate processes from end to end.
Hopefully these use cases illustrate why event-driven automation should be a foundational pillar of IT operations in 2024 and beyond. The scale of modern IT is simply unsustainable without it. Here are a few parting recommendations on getting started:
-
Instrument critical systems to capture a broad stream of events, context, and telemetry.
-
Analyze and aggregate event streams into unified dashboards for visibility.
-
Develop playbooks to automate response workflows for common events.
-
Start small with low-risk use cases and expand from there.
-
Invest in integration and messaging to connect events across tools.
-
Build skills in areas like event streaming, automation engineering, and machine learning.
While challenges like process change management exist, the benefits dramatically outweigh the investments. Leading IT organizations recognize event-driven automation as a core competency they must build for the future. The time to start is now.