Organisations are increasingly investing in automating projects in recent years. Automating systems reduces the chance of potential errors, makes companies more efficient and performant, and ensures improved security. According to Arne Covens, Cloud Solutions Expert at Arxus, automation is even a requirement if companies want to remain competitive in the future.

Automation has seen strong growth within the IT sector for several years now, and it can have different meanings. At Arxus, the field can be divided into two categories. On the one hand, you have the repetitive tasks in your company that you can automate. Here, we look at which tasks are there, occur frequently, and can be fully automated by writing a script for the action. A good example here is deploying a new server. Such a task,manually, quickly takes an hour or more. With an automated script, the server is up and running within 15 minutes. This makes it much more efficient, which can also save you costs as an organisation. In addition, you also rule out potential human error.

But you can also integrate automation further into your system to script certain scenarios. For example, some organisations use it to monitor certain systems or follow up on tasks you wouldn't otherwise have time for. Think of orders that need to be processed daily, or systems you want to check for possible attacks. You can also use automation to gain insights that would otherwise be far too labour-intensive. Especially for medium-sized and large companies, it can therefore be a handy tool to further professionalise their organisation.

Automation also has some advantages you might not immediately think of as a business leader. Repetitive tasks will gradually disappear from your employees' jobs. Jobs will become more challenging in the future, again giving employees more job satisfaction. On the other hand, your employees will also have more free time to devote to more interesting tasks that can add value for both employers and employees.

Define the scope

Before we can start automating processes or systems, there are some set of steps we go through. First, we need to determine a scope of what we can automate. This depends on how your organisation is structured, what your needs are, but especially what is important to you and your organisation. We also clearly note your expectations, and check their feasibility.

In the next step, we look at what solutions we can offer. To do this, we sit down with any internal engineers during some workshops. Then we build the required architecture. We make sure it is immediately future-proof and easy to manage. Afterwards, internal engineers can thus maintain the operational component themselves.

Ansible

For automating tasks and processes, Arxus uses Ansible. That is a popular open source automation tool that can be used for a variety of tasks, such as configuration management, application deployment and task automation.

The big advantage of Ansible is that a huge community has been formed since. New architecture is often built for automation. By making use of the community, Arxus can quickly offer the most challenging solutions to their customers. Ansible can be used to manage a wide range of operating systems such as Windows, Linux and MacOS. In addition, the tool is scalable, simple and user-friendly, making it easy to understand and use even for non-technical users.

Besides Ansible, we also use Terraform at Arxus. Arxus uses Terraform mainly in the server deployment part, where they deploy Ansible mainly on the server configuration part. A combination of both is the ideal scenario, but strongly depends on your needs and wishes as a customer.

Is your company also in need of further automation? Or are you curious about the possibilities? Then get in touch soon with your sales manager within Arxus, or contact us here.