The Business Challenge

Service Automation is the next step in the evolution of IT infrastructure management, where process definition, standards, and IT automation help lower cost and risk, while ensuring compliance, service availability, and responsiveness to changing business needs.

Service Automation leverages and supports best-practice standards adoption, including the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Best of all, it allows you to build on your service management investments and workflow, so you don’t have to deal with the trauma and expense of a “rip and replace” implementation.

Service Automation's Benefits

• Help IT operations staff do their jobs better, faster, and smarter by automating and standardizing repetitive tasks and eliminating human error

• Speed cross-functional processes by integrating and orchestrating workflow

• Facilitate BSM implementation through incremental deployment that delivers tangible value each step of the way

• Align IT with business needs through business service-oriented orchestration that keeps IT in control of automation

• Meet the need for controlled process and fast action — without compromising one for the other

A Comprehensive Service Automation Approach

Service Automation manages all the components of your IT infrastructure from the perspective of the business. The core Service Automation solutions are:

• BMC BladeLogic Operations Manager keeps servers secure and up-to-date through automated software rollout and maintenance. It reduces the risks and costs of security breaches, viruses, and human error, while automating time-intensive, repetitive server administration tasks.

• BMC BladeLogic Application Release Manager extends these capabilities and supports ITIL V3 by enabling IT organizations to align their release and change management processes by automating application packaging, promotion, and rollout across development, QA, staging, and production environments.

• BMC Configuration Automation for Clients automates the provisioning and maintenance of user systems, applications, and operating systems according to user roles and corporate policies. IT operations staff can cost-effectively and securely update, patch, manage, and verify changes to systems — regardless of their location or network connection speed. It reduces the risk and cost of security breaches, viruses, and human error while automating time-intensive, repetitive server administration tasks.

• BMC Configuration Automation for Networks addresses the automated configuration and management of complex, multi-vendor network infrastructures. It centrally defines, audits, and enforces compliance to corporate and regulatory network security polices and rapidly assesses and remediates network security vulnerabilities. By establishing a baseline of data and then detecting and reporting changes, it ensures rapid discovery and remediation when an undesired change occurs.

• BMC Run Book Automation orchestrates and automates end-to-end processes that can involve multiple IT service management tools and solutions from different vendors. It replaces error-prone human interaction with end-to-end, ITIL-compatible process orchestration, and integrates out-of-the-box with the BMC Atrium CMDB, other solutions from BMC, and solutions from other vendors. It not only automates process execution, but also provides built-in process measurement to help you continually assess and improve your automated processes.

To learn how Column's Service Automation solutions and services can improve performance while reducing costs and risk, you can contact a Column office, have Column contact you, or chat with a Column representative.