IT professionals are continuously overwhelmed with the number of tasks they need to perform every day. That’s why automation has become more important than ever. The question is which tasks should be automated—and how?
Best tasks to automate
Based on work I have done with many customers over the years, the best tasks to automate remain those that are repetitive, labor-intensive, related to maintenance, and do not fully utilize the skills of IT staff. Specifically, excellent candidates are tasks involving:
- Discovery
- Security
- Patching
- Configuration management
- Compliance
- Service provisioning
- IT service management
Automating these tasks has enabled BMC customers to shift resources from maintenance to innovation, allowing them to:
- Become more efficient
- Improve the offerings and services they deliver to their customers
- Increase deployment quality
- Gain competitive advantage
Automation becomes even more powerful when products are used together, and form solutions that span across an organization. For example, consider automation of the change and configuration management process. The ability to discover a problem, analyze it, open a change ticket, obtain approval for the change, plan and execute the remediation, verify successful implementation, and close the ticket can deliver enormous gains in efficiency and employee productivity.
Another example is solutions for accelerating multi-cloud adoption, whether for migrating existing applications or deploying cloud native apps, to improve the speed and success rate of moving to the cloud.
The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, 2020
That takes us to The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020 where BMC was named a “Strong Performer”.
BMC received the second highest score in the Infrastructure Management criterion, and among the second highest scores in the Deployment, Governance and Compliance, Product Vision, Innovation Roadmap, and Execution Roadmap criteria.
I believe this report acknowledges the benefits BMC solutions provide to customers through automation and advanced analytics, and the business value they deliver by increasing efficiency, lowering costs, strengthening security, and improving performance and availability.
Here’s what Forrester said about BMC:
- “BMC Software has a strong pedigree…its combination of products is ahead of most competitors at discovery, model creation and editing, and application awareness.”
- “It also has better access governance and dashboards than most of its competitors, as well as strong compliance and vulnerability management support.”
- “Customer references appreciate the tools’ extensibility; in fact, some said they were able to retire certain other vendors’ tools in favor of using it.”
- “BMC Software’s solution is a good fit for firms that need to manage myriad systems: mainframe, infrastructure-as-code, physical servers, and network switches.”
I invite you to read the The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020 which can be accessed here, and learn more about the strength of BMC’s current offerings (discovery, server automation and vulnerability management, network automation, cloud security, mainframe automation, and more), strategy, and how IT automation can help you.
