The End of Automation Anxiety

By Chrystal Taylor, Head Geek, SolarWinds

In 2021, we'll begin to see a reversal in the industry's "automation anxiety." With tightening budgets and other pandemic-induced operational challenges, organizations and tech teams will have no choice but to fully embrace automation to optimize environments and reduce the time spent on monotonous tasks. This will include automating time-consuming tasks like workstation patching, configuration changes for network devices, compliance checks and remediation, server patching, and more.

This shift to automation will help reduce toil, improve processes, and prevent burnout-three scourges resulting from COVID-19. It'll also have a significant impact on the day-to-day role of tech pros. The extra time they'll finally have will allow them to be able to learn more skills and focus more on their career path.

One area primed for greater automation is the IT help desk. As monitoring and service desk integrations become more prevalent, tech pros will start the process of automating ticket assignments, asset updates, configuration management database (CMDB) updates, updates to customers, and more. This will not only keep monitoring and service desk systems and teams in sync but take menial tasks and delays out of the equation, allowing common issues to be resolved faster and saving the business time and money.

##

About the Author

Chrystal Taylor, Head Geek, SolarWinds

Chrystal Taylor is a dedicated technologist with nearly a decade of experience and has built her career by leveraging curiosity to solve problems, no matter the size, industry, or client. Whether tinkering with the family computer, or inflicting general destruction in MS-DOS Tank Wars, Taylor has always been a geek.

Taylor is a SolarWinds deployment veteran who's built a successful IT career by translating client needs into optimized and performant systems. She loves customizing current deployments to ensure systems grow in tandem with user needs. She's achieved several SolarWinds certifications. A THWACK® MVP since 2011, she understands the power of community and the SolarWinds commitment to its users.

In her role as the Global Services Team Lead for Loop1 Systems, Taylor was the troubleshooting sniper, handling technical escalation for the engineering team, providing break/fix and augmentation support, and assisting clients as the subject matter expert for SolarWinds® Orion® Platform and Security Event Manager (SEM) (formerly Log & Event Manager) products. Her focus on capacity planning, server architecture, and troubleshooting allow her to attack any issue on multiple fronts.