At Identity Automation, we focus on providing solutions to meet a wide variety of our customers’ needs. As our name implies, “Automation” is an important aspect of our belief that consistent, repeatable activities are key to any successful IT endeavor. Our RapidIdentity product set allows our customers to follow in that mindset and to build, test, and deploy highly tailored and effective management tools quickly, efficiently, and creatively. This all helps to minimize an organization’s staff efforts, while maximizing productivity.
Infrastructure Management
Infrastructure Management — just speak the words, and your IT support staff cringe in fear. The bigger your organization, the more difficult it becomes to routinely handle various tasks across a very widespread and diverse network, while still leaving time for other workloads. Limited or untrained staff, including a lack of cross-training and an abundance of servers, workstations, network communications devices, virtual machines, LAN / WAN, multi-site networks, cloud services, and more all contribute to challenges. The ratio of responsibilities to manpower keeps growing and growing.
While some tasks will always require manual user intervention, wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a balance — a utopia:
- Where the more regularly scheduled tasks seem to ‘handle themselves’
- Where actions that would typically require a specialist in one or the other operating system suddenly become automated or repeatable by someone with less (or no) experience
- Where there exists an ability to dedicate and devote more staff time to more functional, business-related projects, rather than mundane technical activities
Well, my friends, this is where utopia becomes a reality.
In this series
In this series of blog posts, I’ll discuss ways in which common and not so common tasks can be automated to simplify IT infrastructure management. You’ll find that the same methodologies and tools used in our examples are easy to duplicate and that you can manipulate them to accomplish a variety of redundant tasks, with minimal impact to technical staff scheduling and budget constraints.
I’ll provide simplified but useful examples of each of the following:
- Managing Linux Hosts
- Managing Windows Hosts
- Checking Status of RapidIdentity Password Filter Installations on DC’s
- Performing OpenVAS Vulnerability Scans
- Monitoring AWS EC2 Instances
- Starting and Stopping AWS EC2 Instances
By the end of the series, you’ll have an understanding of how to connect to and effectively manage various pieces of your infrastructure. You’ll be able to take what you’ve learned and build more customized solutions, specific to your environment and needs. And hopefully, you’ll find a new appreciation for all of the benefits that “Automation” of infrastructure management can bring to your organization.
Looking forward to building some useful infrastructure management tools? I’ll see you in our next post, Managing Linux Hosts!
Comments