All too often, the Kelverion team hear that businesses are trying to deliver more services with less resource, all whilst meeting tight Service Level Agreements. There are many automation use cases to relieve this pressure, and this article explores the six use case examples driving automation adoption within service management.
1. Starters, Movers & Leavers
Starters, Movers & Leavers (also known as Joiners, Movers & Leavers) is one of the most painful tasks for overloaded service desks to process. The creation of accounts for new employees or temporary workers, adjusting access for users moving roles and terminating IT accounts for those departing your business, are labour intensive activities which require senior staff who have the necessary systems access and expertise to perform.
- Office 365 Management
Office 365 saves companies the huge headaches of Exchange and SharePoint infrastructure. However, the management of users and permissions is still laborious; from creating users to adding users to groups, assigning a license, to disabling a user; the automation of these tasks releases pressure on the service management team.
Some organisations believe that these tasks must be completed manually because of security concerns with administration rights, but this needn’t be the case. The key is to provide a self-service interface for anyone to submit requests, controlled via an existing change management approval process, the automation platform executes the Office 365 Management requests automatically in minutes.
- Standard IT Tasks
There are many day-to-day standard tasks which are completed manually by IT staff. Even in the unlikely scenario that the workload of this isn’t an issue, these tedious tasks will be impacting on the morale of the service desk team; whose time could be spent better elsewhere.
Password resets, restarting a virtual machine, deleting an Active Directory account and a ping or traceroute check; these standard daily tasks can all be automated.
- Virtual Machine provisioning
Using virtual machines to run different operating systems, test applications and back up data has been game-changing for IT agility, but manually creating and managing these VMs takes time. Automating the provisioning of VMs is another instance of where automation can save your organisation time and money.
Virtual machines are built and managed securely through self-service requests, which ensures that IT remains in control of these assets.
- Self-Service software delivery
Our final automation use case example is; the automatic installation of software. When the end-user requires a new application, they are typically left to wait for a senior member of an IT resolver group to add the end-user to a software deployment tool group to action. This can and should be automated.
6. Patch Management
Patching servers is critical to ensure that IT infrastructure remains secure. However, completing patching manually is complex and time-consuming. Most organisations have a combination of Windows and Linux operating systems and have struggled to find a patching solution covering both platforms. In addition, monthly patch deployments can be an unreliable process; it is, therefore, essential for a reporting function to identify when a patch deployment has been successful to ensure that servers remain secure and compliant. Automating Patch Management allows teams to schedule patch deployments, manage exceptions and patching issues rather than every single patch deployment.
Empowering the end-user
One of the most exciting advancements in automation is the implementation of the self-service portal. All the above use case examples can be completed by the end-user; via the submission of the request through any self-service portal.
Not only does this reduce call volumes, but also delivers a modern experience for the end-user, something which is becoming expected in the workplace and will exceed the expectations of your internal stakeholders.
Next steps
If you are considering using Azure Automation to automate service requests such as the above use case examples, be sure to reach out to Kelverion. We have over a decade of experience in automation both on-premise and with Azure Automation. The Kelverion Runbook Suite, which has been specially created to enable organisations to harness the power of Azure Automation is formed of 4 parts:
The Runbook Studio: A ‘click and configure’ graphical authoring environment in which to create and modify the automation processes, that will save your business hundreds of ‘man-hours’. Similar to a Visio diagram, this image-based approach means users don’t need to write lines of code.
Integrations: We’re proud that our products wrap around your existing ITSM and connect automation through our ‘smart discovery’ technology. Take a look at our Integration library.
Solution packs: pre-built automation solutions, ready to be deployed and tweaked to the exact requirements of your organisation.
Automation Portal: For those customers who don’t have a self-service portal within their service desk, we have built an automation portal; empowering end-users to complete their own service requests and fulfilling these requests with automation.
For more information, to arrange a discovery call or to see a demonstration please contact our helpful team today via info@kelverion.com.
