The way government manages and supports its IT efforts hasn’t changed in nearly three decades. Many agencies and IT departments struggle mightily with legacy technology and tight budgets, innovation in terms of managing networks is hard to come by. This can negatively affect government in a variety of ways – it makes it difficult to modernize, transform digitally, and offer citizens the services they need.
One solution that can help governments at all levels with their network management and digital transformations is IT automation. At its core, IT automation can replace manual labor currently carried out by IT administrators and other personnel. Automation technology can improve current processes, migrate applications for better optimization and provide a single language for DevOps practices across your organization. Networks are integral parts of IT enterprises, yet true automation of the network stack is nearly nonexistent in government. When organizations are automating networks, they’re using proprietary vendor-specific tooling that requires significant training to use. Long, detailed and complex Methods of Procedure (MOPs) have to be manually managed, and often result in delays and reduced organizational agility.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, and that’s why Red Hat has partnered with GovLoop to create this pocket guide to IT automation in the public sector. To truly unleash government innovation, the public sector must turn to automation. When repetitive labor and processes are solved by deploying automation technologies, then and only then will IT managers truly have the needed freedom to spend more time exploring and adopting new technologies, rather than spending their time keeping the lights on.
