Will the data centres in India opt to fully automate

Digital transformation is redefining how businesses work. This has significantly augmented the demand for more storage space, computing power and complex networking, which in turn has given rise to scaling up of infrastructure in the existing data centers. The majority of IT professionals feel that most of the data center and network tasks will be completely automated by 2025. The rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence is completely changing the way data is stored and networks are configured. The massive growth in data and the speed at which businesses operate today mean that manual monitoring and troubleshooting can slow down the growth.

Automation can come handy here by making daily routine operations autonomous. There are multiple benefits when the data center gets automated, this includes managing and automating the workflow and processes of a data center facility. It is predominantly delivered through software solutions that grant centralized access to all or most data center resources. Traditionally, this access enables the automation of storage, servers, network, and other data center management operations, management, monitoring and maintenance related tasks that are otherwise performed manually by human operators. Whatever, you make the automation stronger, you need a workforce with the proper skill set to manage those tools and effectively implement the automation process.

IT automation will help you in reducing the manual tasks. Hence, your IT department can focus on more important tasks. Network infrastructure automation will also help you in making the network configuration more streamlined. AI and machine learning are causing organizations to generate more data, which is helpful in improving business operations and efficiencies; however, storing this amount of data can be difficult, slowing down networks. There are multiple advantages while automating the data center includes, automation accelerates the provisioning of the infrastructure necessary to enable the businesses in achieving faster time-to-market. Secondly, it’ll help them in identifying patterns of their power consumption and allocating resources accordingly.

Further, AI and ML can also help in predictive analysis of your maintenance, thereby allowing your IT team to avoid any data center outage. It also helps in providing real-time analytics which enables organizations to put in place real-time responsiveness. This is useful for supporting anomaly detection, root cause analysis, remediation, prevention and planning use cases, where processing and correlating massive amounts of information is critical. Data center automation accelerates the provisioning of the infrastructure necessary to support business services. It also enforces good practice and automates manual tasks. However, just like DevOps, automation is really more about a mind shift than a technology shift. Thus, organizations need to focus on building the required skill sets to help them make their data centers more effective and efficient.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA