Automation is a big topic for companies, no matter the industry. Whether you are from IT or another business area, you are likely hearing about automating as a way of saving money, improving efficiencies, and removing inherent errors. Both automation and orchestration are essential to Successful Business Transformation.

What is IT automation?

Automation, generally speaking, means completing a single task or function without human intervention. Automating a task can apply to both desktop-only tasks and cloud tasks. This single task can be anything:

• Automating the discovery of Network devices
• Automating inventory of the IT devices
• Stopping a service

Individuals can automate daily tasks to improve their efficiency, but companies of all industries and sizes look to automation to increase efficiency at scale.

In IT, it’s possible to automate a wide range of processes and tasks, from app deployment and integration to securing endpoints and creating service tickets, for both on-premises and cloud tasks. In cloud automation, for instance, you might use automation tools and machine learning to dynamically deploy assets to the cloud, manage cloud computing workloads or classify terabytes of images.

What is orchestration?

At its core, Orchestration is most akin to managing a large-scale virtual environment or network. More formally, the definition of orchestration includes the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of:

• IT Infrastructure and Systems
• Middleware
• Services

Orchestrating the scheduling and integration of automated tasks between complex distributed systems and services—whether on-premises or in the cloud—streamlines and simplifies interconnected workloads, repeatable processes, and operations. Using orchestration tools like Infiworx, you can automate the arrangement, coordination, and management of complex IT systems, networks, middleware, and services within your computing environment, and direct automated processes to support larger workflows.

The difference between automation and orchestration:

So, while automation refers to a single task, orchestration arranges tasks to optimize a workflow. For example, orchestrating an app means not only deploying an application but also connecting it to the network so it can communicate with users and other apps.

Infiworx is a Network Automation software from Infinity Labs which functions as a single source of truth of network data to gain complete visibility and verify network’s behaviour to avoid outages.

Automation and orchestration benefits:

Automating one task may impress your users or make them aware that something has sped up a little bit. On its own, simple automation will not make a big perceivable difference. But when automation is built into a series of processes and workflows, which are then orchestrated to run automatically, there can be endless benefits.

In Summary, whether your infrastructure, applications, and data are housed on-premises or in the cloud, automation and orchestration make complex business processes run smoothly. The more technologies, vendors, applications, locations & infrastructure you’re managing, the more helpful the Infiworx software will be, no matter what your IT strategy is. Together, Automation & Orchestration using Infiworx solution can help reduce IT costs, ramp up productivity, and free up personnel focus for more strategic pursuits. This digital transformation is all about the customer experience and how a business delivers value to the customer.

Yougender Kumar (Chief Digital Officer, CDO)