5 IT automation examples that ops teams should implement today

Compliance and security are two of the biggest challenges modern organizations face. Compliance essentially ensures that the business follows rules established by governmental authority and industry standards, while security prioritizes the protection of applications and sensitive data. Both challenges coalesce in enterprise IT -- and automated change management, along with log analysis, can reduce them.

Change management is a central element of IT compliance. Uncontrolled changes in a server or application configuration can lead to performance degradation and security vulnerabilities. A business can prove that its IT infrastructure is configured for optimal performance and security when it establishes and maintains hardware and software in a desired state configuration. At the same time, comprehensive monitoring and management of security events leads to log analysis for investigation and remediation -- but pouring over numerous logs by hand can be time-consuming and inconclusive.

Automated change management tools specify and enforce a desired configuration, and enable an organization to plan, map, manage and report more effectively on changes when they occur. IT change management tools include SolarWinds IT Change Management, Spiceworks and BMC TrueSight. Similarly, log analytics tools ingest and process a multitude of existing logs from servers, services and applications to find correlations and identify security or functional incidents for remediation. Log analytics tools include SolarWinds Security Event Manager, Paessler PRTG Network Monitor, Loggly and ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer.

There is great potential for the use of AI in log analytics to produce more detailed cause-and-effect or root-cause assessments of changes and security incidents.