Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

With drift and other issues putting your desired state at risk every day, you may wonder: What is configuration management? And how does it work? Every organization needs to define the ideal configuration of its systems. That ideal configuration, or desired state, is the state in which systems and resources are aligned to support development, network performance, and efficiency. In short, you want your environment to keep running in a desired state. Configuration management helps you do that.

Any agent with some expertise knows that when things start to get busy, IT support automation can be a lifesaver. The beauty of it is that it allows your team to manage much more requests simultaneously, freeing up valuable time and resources to assign to more relevant tasks. Most IT Service Management tools provide different types of automation processes, and InvGate Service Desk is no exception.

Cybersecurity threats are coming in hot and have quickly become an urgent concern for organizations of all sizes. In response, security teams are shifting away from homegrown security solutions and towards automation using commercially available tools. As organizations seek to improve their security resilience, they find themselves also needing to scale their security teams more efficiently as they address continuous staffing shortages.

The third and final chapter in our three part blog series. John Appleby sits down with Nick Miletich, CTO at Managecore, to discuss how building a next generation managed service firm had to include automation at the helm.

For the last ten years, one of the most popular Integrations in the market has been for organisations that have deployed Microsoft System Center to manage their infrastructure, who also use ServiceNow as their corporate Service Desk. The need to integrate Microsoft System Center was originally driven by the need to automate the generation of ServiceNow tickets from events in System Center Operations Manager.

Budgets in IT departments are tight these days, so proving a return on investment is essential for justifying or expanding a project. The good news is that automation saves money by reducing the amount of human effort required. It is similar to investing in a robot vacuum cleaner. Despite the upfront cost, you save time (and money) by not having humans do the vacuuming. Reporting the value delivered by an automation program can be challenging since the value depends heavily on what is being automated.

Concerns of automation taking away the available jobs for the workforce have prevailed for over 50 years. While automation can be a substitute for labor, David Autor declares, “Automation also complements labor, raises output in ways that lead to higher demand for labor, and interacts with adjustments in labor supply.” Automation can be invaluable for industries that provide professional services.

Moving to the cloud is no small feat, especially for enterprise-scale infrastructure. And just imagine the complications when you need to deploy across more than one cloud. Multi-cloud deployment is sometimes characterized by slow, error-prone workloads, lack of consistency, and inflexibility that holds users back. In this blog, we’ll provide clear definitions, use cases, benefits, challenges, and factors to consider for multi-cloud deployment.