Seize the power of automation: IT areas to automate right now

There are hundreds, even thousands, of new small and medium-sized businesses or companies started every day. The process of setting up a business or a company is now much easier than ever before. Thanks to advanced technologies such as cloud computing, people are now able to start up their own companies without spending a huge amount of capital or needing large initial investments. However, for any SMB to survive in this fast-paced technical era, they need to adapt and learn to automate tasks. Automation is the best friend of any growing company because it saves time, effort, and costs. Automation also helps to boost productivity by getting the job done efficiently with minimal or no errors in the process. By using automation, companies can reduce a lot of mundane human tasks, allowing employees to focus on processes that actually require human intervention. Automation also provides better insights into your business, an especially crucial need for every young company.

Here are some of the major advantages of automation:

  • Cost reductions
  • Performance
  • Reliability
  • Better planning
  • Reduced need for outsourcing
  • Easy integrations
  • Productivity
  • Availability
  • Improved safety
  • Faster return on investment

Now that we are aware of some of the major advantages and benefits offered by automation, here are the essential areas in IT that need to be automated. Not every process can be fully automated — many will still need some human assistance. But the use of automation tools and processes can still save a lot of time, effort, and costs.

Customer service

The first area that needs to be automated is customer service. Customer service serves as one of the predominant aspects of any company’s growth. However, a huge amount of capital is also needed to perform customer service using non-automated processes.

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Automating customer service can reap many benefits for companies while saving a lot of human efforts. Automation in customer service can actually serve the customers better in the most essential aspects — quality and speed. Automation tools can help reduce issues resolving time and ensures no customer complaint goes unanswered. Although customer service cannot be fully handed over to automation tools and will still need a human essence in dealing with customers, they can help in streamlining the process and making it easy for employees to work more efficiently and effectively. The key to excellent customer service relies on the blend of having human interaction along with the right amount of automation.

Social media campaigns

Branding and social media promotions are an absolute essential these days to promote sales and the value of a company. Social media promotions and campaigns play a vital role in creating brand awareness, value, and provides a very effective means of staying connected with customers. However, these social media campaigns can be both time and effort consuming if performed in traditional ways.

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There are several social media automation tools available in the market that work very efficiently to automate most (if not all) of these social media-related tasks. By automating, companies can benefit from increased productivity, efficiency, and accuracy in reaching a huge user base through social media.

Testing

Almost everyone among us is already aware of how much time and effort can be saved using automated testing over manual testing when it comes to software and applications. Automated testing takes exponentially less time to perform huge tests compared to the time taken to do it manually.

The process of automating testing is now powered by several tools and services, which do various types of testing such as unit, integration, performance, load, and regressive testing. Automating the process of testing is very important to pace up the development and support operations. Automated testing facilitates the process of development and operation and is, therefore, one of the most preferred means in the fast-pacing Agile and DevOps environments. Automated testing tools can perform huge test cases in minutes that would need weeks if not months if done manually. However, not every test case can be automated. Functional and behavior testing and analysis of a product or software need to be performed either by humans or with human intervention.

Security and monitoring

With the growing number of cyberattacks and data breaches and thefts, security is of paramount importance. Even the best security solutions and analysts are failing to deal with increasing cyberthreats. Constant monitoring and log management are an essential aspect of security. And the use of automated tools and services to perform these security and monitoring related tasks can save a lot of human efforts and provide accurate and efficient security loggings.

automation

Automation can be used to set up processes to detect unusual activities such as malware, misconfigurations, suspicious behaviors, and device usage policies. In most of the scenarios, any of these aspects results in a cyberattack and poses a serious threat to the company’s reputation and operations.

IT operations

With the increasing uses of technology, companies are seeing an increasing user base, which results in an increased need for IT operations. While some companies outsource their operations department to other companies for a huge amount of money, most of them are adopting hybrid environments such as DevOps to deal with IT operations along with the development.

Almost all companies across the globe spend a considerable amount of time in IT operations, maintenance, and bug fixes. Thankfully, most IT operations-related tasks can be automated. Automation techniques such as scheduled batch processing can be employed to automate regular data operations. Automated application analyses can be used to monitor and perform health checks on IT products such as mobile and web applications and more. Automation can also be used in hardware and software maintenance, monitoring, installation, and other essential operational processes.

Recruitment

Companies spend a good proportion of their time in their human resources and recruitment processes. A considerable amount of human efforts are needed to conduct HR processes such as recruitment.

With automation, more than half of the recruitment process can be automated. Companies can employ online screening tests, use AI to analyze the qualifications of the applicants, and use other online tools to pick up and select the right candidates for the roles.

Automating job candidates’ interviews can be helpful in managing a high volume of applications. More than half of the screening can be automated in the process of recruitment, and this itself saves a huge proportion of costs you will be allocating to the recruitment process.

Power of automation: Flex your IT muscles

There are several other domain-specific processes and tasks that can be automated such as the use of robotics in production lines, use of bots in hospitality, and resource rendering in telecom. While some of the processes can completely rely on automation and can function independently, some of them need human intervention to ensure and regulate the operations and process flow. However, in either case, automation can improve efficiency and accuracy while saving money — all key aspects in making a young company a success.

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