Introduction

This particular topic – Automation always fascinated me as IT Professional and in specific to IT Automation. The journey of IT Automation correlates to various Industrial revolutions Industry at large witnessed in last 100+ years. 

Brief History of Automation

• 18th century-The invention of the spinning jenny and power loom automated the process of spinning and weaving.
• 19th century-The invention of new machines such as the steam hammer and Bessemer converter further advanced automation.
• Early 20th century-Henry Ford revolutionized mass production with the introduction of the assembly line.
• Mid-20th century-The invention of programmable controllers and the development of electronic and computer technology, led to greater automation in manufacturing and other industries.
• Late 20th century-The widespread use of robots in manufacturing and other industries became increasingly common.
• 21st century-The advent of new technologies such as RPA, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and IOT, have enabled machines to perform more complex tasks and make decisions autonomously & intelligently. 

The evolution of automation had a significant impact and continues to do so in increasing efficiency & effectiveness of usage [EE], reducing labour costs and increasing productivity across many industries & segments across countries. Computers , IT Systems and robotics have played a significant role in the development of automation by providing the necessary computing power and control capabilities to automate complex and dangerous tasks, increasing efficiency, productivity, and safety in industrial processes.

With the continued advancements in technology, automation is likely to become even more prevalent in the future.

Recent Trend of Automation in Information Technology 

IT Automation covers wide variety of tools, practices, and capabilities. It’s a rapidly evolving field driven by continuous advancements in Digital Technology leading towards Digital Transformation and Digital Economy. 

Various tools and products and practices are used to automate some of the important domains of the enterprise covering –

• Workload Automation (WLA) 
• IT Process Automation (ITPA) 
• Business Process Automation (BPA)
• Big Data/Hadoop Automation
• Infrastructure Automation Incl. Monitoring 
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Batch Process Automation/Managed File Transfers (MFTs)
• Batch monitoring

Some of the above streams or aspects or domains has seen some recent trends in IT Automation – 

DevOps – DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity over traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. 

GitOps-GitOps evolved from DevOps. The specific state of code deployment or infrastructure product or tool deployment where in configuration details (parameters and other important values) is version-controlled and base lined and subject to Change Management. This is done using Git. 

GitOps’ approach has been named after Git. 

Infrastructure-as-code-IaC-Infrastructure as code, also referred to as IaC, where it codifies and manages underlying IT infrastructure as software. IT Resources and Infrastructure provisioning enablement is done by Operations Teams using IaC thus automatically manage, monitor and provision IT Infrastructure & resources versus manually configure discrete hardware devices and operating systems leading to increasing cycle time & errors/incidents/calls. 

Infrastructure as code is sometimes referred to as programmable or software-defined infrastructure.

Ansible® [Red Hat] and Terraform® [HashiCorp] are two tools often used as infrastructure-as-code (IaC). Although distinct in purpose, the two tools do have some overlap. The tool can automate infrastructure provisioning in both on-premises and cloud environments.

Digital Transformation- Digital transformation is the process of adoption and implementation of digital technology at enterprise level in order to create new or modify existing products, services and operations by the means of translating business processes into a digital format. 

Here Intelligent Document Processing [IDP] covering Enterprise Content Management [ECM] using open source based ECM/DMS or Product based ECM/DMS plays pivotal role showcased by rich customer experience [CX] [Portal based] leading to enriched Digital Experience. [DX]

Data to Intelligence-Another important aspect or domain of the enterprise is translating data to intelligence by creating data lakes, data warehouse using some of the cloud services like Redshift, S3, RDS, data factory etc. [DIKW]

Robotics Process Automation-RPA-This recent trend enables using automation technologies to mimic back-office tasks of human workers such as extracting data, filling in forms, moving files, etc. Automation of mundane tasks. 

Automation Certification @ ZOC Learnings

With above mentioned trends getting followed across Industry, its structured understanding by getting accredited through various certification at ZOC Learnings is the correct approach. 

Summary

Overall, the future of automation is likely to be characterized by increased connectivity, increased autonomy, and increased intelligence enabled by AI/ML, which will lead to greater efficiency, productivity, and convenience in a wide range of industries and applications.