In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, automation plays a vital role in streamlining processes and driving operational efficiency. However, as automation strategies become more complex, organizations often struggle to cope with the expanding workload types, volumes, and locations, leading to a lack of visibility and control. To address these challenges and unlock the full potential of automation, a standardized automation broker framework emerges as a crucial solution. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of an automation broker and how it empowers organizations to achieve a seamless integration, governance, and orchestration of automation workflows.

The need for a unified automation framework

With the increasing adoption of automation, organizations are faced with a sprawling automation landscape, encompassing various tools and systems. This expansion brings forth challenges in automation governance, making it difficult to maintain control and visibility. Balancing the democratization of automation with effective governance becomes crucial for organizations to harness automation’s benefits.

Understanding the automation broker

At the core of solving automation governance challenges lies the concept of an automation broker, which is a software component or platform that acts as a centralized hub, connecting different automation tools, systems, and services. Its primary role is to orchestrate and manage automation workflows, providing a unified interface for executing tasks and ensuring seamless integration.

Core capabilities

An automation broker offers several key capabilities to facilitate effective automation management:

1. Workflow automation: Automation brokers enable the creation and management of automated workflows that span multiple applications, both on-premises and in the cloud. These tools provide graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for designing workflows, visualizing interdependencies, and integrating disparate tasks and data sources.
2. Event-driven automation: Event-driven automation involves sensing inputs, validating them against configured rules and policies, and taking appropriate actions in response. Automation brokers facilitate the implementation of such sense-and-response workflows, using logic based on “if this, then that” principles.
3. Self-service automation: Self-service automation enables users to request and fulfill automation tasks independently. Examples include access requests and guest Wi-Fi, which are typically integrated into IT service management (ITSM) forms. Automation brokers ensure these self-service requests are seamlessly handled and processed.
4. Scheduling, monitoring, visibility, and alerting: Automation brokers offer essential components for maintaining visibility and meeting service level agreements (SLAs). They provide monitoring capabilities for tasks, schedules, and alerts, helping organizations proactively identify and address issues and optimize automation processes.
5. Resource fulfillment and infrastructure as code: Automation brokers facilitate resource provisioning, allowing organizations to provision compute, network, and storage resources across cloud and on-premises environments. They streamline the process by integrating with multiple adapters or plugins, making resource provisioning efficient and platform-agnostic.

Advantages of an automation broker framework

Implementing an automation broker framework brings several advantages to organizations:

1. Automation tool agnosticism: An automation broker eliminates the need for teams to use specific automation tools. As long as an automation tool provides a standard set of APIs, it can seamlessly integrate with the automation broker, enabling flexibility and choice.
2. Centralized audit trail and reporting: Automation brokers provide a centralized audit trail for all automation activities, allowing organizations to track and monitor the execution of workflows. This centralization also facilitates the creation of value dashboards that showcase the volume of automations, success rates, and return on investment (ROI) to IT leadership.
3. Enhanced governance and risk mitigation: By acting as a centralized hub, an automation broker enables better governance and risk mitigation. It helps identify and mitigate potential issues, preventing buggy codes or scripts from causing catastrophic outages that can impact revenue and reputation.
4. Streamlining collaboration and productivity: With an automation broker, organizations can foster collaboration across teams by providing a unified platform for automation. This also eliminates silos and enables teams to share automation assets, best practices, and knowledge, leading to increased productivity and efficiency.

Based on the above points below is a high level illustration of how one can develop an Automation broker Framework. The product and tools mentioned here are purely to explain the concept. Some of these blocks may change based on specific need and requirements for your respective organization but the core concept of unifying automation using the broker will remain the same.

Figure 1: Automation Broker Framework

Developing an effective automation broker framework

Implementing an effective automation broker framework involves considering several key aspects:

1. Integration with existing automation tools: Ensure seamless integration with a wide range of automation tools, allowing organizations to leverage their existing investments and tools of choice.
2. Scalable architecture and extensibility: Design the automation broker with scalability and extensibility in mind. This ensures it can accommodate future growth, handle increasing automation demands, and integrate with emerging technologies.
3. Security and access control measures: Implement robust security measures to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance. Define proper access controls, permissions, and authentication mechanisms to safeguard automation workflows and resources.
4. Monitoring and analytics capabilities: Integrate comprehensive monitoring and analytics capabilities into the automation broker, enabling organizations to gain insights, identify bottlenecks, and optimize automation workflows for maximum efficiency.
5. Integration with external systems: Enable seamless integration with external systems such as ITSM platforms, ticketing systems, and notification services. This integration enhances automation capabilities and ensures smooth communication and data exchange between the automation broker and these systems.

Conclusion

As organizations strive to become digital-first businesses in an always-on world, a standardized automation broker framework becomes indispensable. By leveraging the power of an automation broker, organizations can establish a unified automation ecosystem, streamline governance, and achieve seamless integration of diverse automation tools and systems. With the ability to orchestrate, manage, and monitor automation workflows, an automation broker empowers organizations to navigate the complexities of automation, unlock its full potential, and thrive in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

We’re all hoping that 2022 will finally end the unprecedented challenges brought by the global pandemic and things will return to a new normalcy. For IT infrastructure and operations organizations, the rising trends that we are seeing today will likely continue, but there are still a few areas that will need special attention from IT leaders over the next 12 to 18 months.

In no particular order, they include:

The New Edge

Edge computing is now at the forefront. Two primary factors that make it business-critical are the increased prevalence of remote and hybrid workplace models where employees will continue working remotely, either from home or a branch office, resulting in an increased adoption of cloud-based businesses and communications services.

With the rising focus on remote and hybrid workplace cultures, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet have continued to expand their solutions and add new features. As people start moving back to office, they are likely to want the same experience they had from home. In a typical enterprise setup, branch office traffic is usually backhauled all the way to the data center. This architecture severely impacts the user experience, so enterprises will have to review their network architectures and come up with a roadmap to accommodate local egress between branch offices and headquarters. That’s where the edge can help, bringing it closer to the workforce.

This also brings an opportunity to optimize costs by migrating from some of the expensive multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) or private circuits to relatively low-cost direct internet circuits, which is being addressed by the new secure access service edge (SASE) architecture that is being offered by many established vendors.

I anticipate some components of SASE, specifically those related to software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), local egress, and virtual private network (VPN), will drive a lot of conversation this year.

Holistic Cloud Strategy

Cloud adoption will continue to grow, and along with software as a service (SaaS), there will be renewed interest in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), albeit for specific workloads. For a medium-to-large-sized enterprise with a substantial development environment, it will still be cost-prohibitive to move everything to the cloud, so any cloud strategy would need to be holistic and forward-looking to maximize its business value.

Another pandemic-induced shift is from using virtual machines (VMs) as a consumption unit of compute to containers as a consumption unit of software. For on-premises or private cloud deployment architectures that require sustainable management, organizations will have to orchestrate containers and deploy efficient container security and management tools.

Automation

Now that cloud adoption, migration, and edge computing architectures are becoming more prevalent, the legacy methods of infrastructure provisioning and management will not be scalable.

By increasing infrastructure automation, enterprises can optimize costs and be more flexible and efficient—but only if they are successful at developing new skills. To achieve the goal of “infrastructure as a code” will require a shift in the perspective on infrastructure automation to one that focuses on developing and sustaining skills and roles that improve efficiency and agility across on-premises, cloud, and edge infrastructures. Defining the roles of designers and architects to support automation is essential to ensure that automation works as expected, avoids significant errors, and complements other technologies.

AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations)

Alongside complementing automation trends, the implementation of AIOps to effectively automate IT operations processes such as event correlation, anomaly detection, and causality determination will also be important. AIOps will eliminate the data silos in IT by bringing all types of data under one roof so it can be used to execute machine learning (ML)-based methods to develop insights for responsive enhancements and corrections.

AIOps can also help with probable cause analytics by focusing on the most likely source of a problem. The concept of site reliability engineering (SRE) is being increasingly adopted by SaaS providers and will gain importance in enterprise IT environments due to the trends listed above. AIOps is a key component that will enable site reliability engineers (SREs) to respond more quickly—and even proactively—by resolving issues without manual intervention.

These focus areas are by no means an exhaustive list. There are a variety of trends that will be more prevalent in specific industry areas, but a common theme in the post-pandemic era is going to be superior delivery of IT services. That’s also at the heart of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, a forward-focused business framework designed to help companies make technology investments for the future.