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"Manage IT as a service" is the new IT mantra. IT organisations are constantly balancing the need to deliver higher levels of service against the requirement to control operational cost.

The key to performing this balancing act successfully is automation of two critical aspects of IT management – data centre operations and client rollout, provisioning, changes and upgrades. And keeping automation focussed on business outcomes requires a new category of technology. It's called "business service automation."

Business service automation is the next step in the evolution of IT management. It involves using automation technologies to manage business services as a whole, across the entire lifecycle, and tying together advancements in business service management and IT service management through automation.

IT automation is not a new concept, of course, and most large enterprises use it to reduce costs and staffing requirements and to speed up operations. But many enterprises lack a unified, complete approach that embraces both data centre management and client-side management.

On the data centre side, IT organisations need to automate the management of servers, network devices and other assets to reduce costs and free administrators to spend more time on developing applications that build competitive advantage; to better comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley; to improve disaster recovery; and to increase network, server and application availability.

On the client side, they need to automate the provisioning, upgrading and management of the client devices, such as PCs, that make their workforces productive. With automated processes, they can distribute software, security patches and operating system images to comply with configuration policies.

In both cases, automation is the key to managing assets without disrupting services. Business service automation is real, and it's already being embraced by many visionary IT organisations in leading industries. The journey towards business service automation involves three steps:

• The first is at the infrastructure level, where IT organisations need to automate all lifecycle management tasks across client, network, server and storage devices, achieving efficiency and repeatability at each step.
• The second is at the process level, orchestrating cross-tier tasks into seamless workflows that support the broader IT management lifecycle.
• Last is achieving a single correlated view that links business services to underlying infrastructure, allowing for accurate impact assessment during every IT service management process.

Simply put, business service automation simplifies data centre operations and client-side management, reducing support costs, lowering time to resolution, maximising uptime – and delivering positive business outcomes.

HP Software offers two comprehensive suites of solutions for business service automation – our Data Center Automation Center and our Client Automation Center – that automate key IT processes across lifecycles. We can help you develop a complete approach to business service automation that supports service-level compliance while controlling operational costs in your data centre and across your enterprise.

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