This month marks the five year anniversary since Red Hat acquired Ansible, and since then, much has changed in the IT automation world. IT organizations have always faced continual pressure to support rapid innovation at-scale, but 2020 has been an especially challenging year. Organizations required solutions that delivered fast responses to changing business requirements, and automation can respond to these needs. As a result, automation has come to the forefront of IT strategy, emerging as a boardroom imperative due to a need for rapid business changes, strong ROI and efficiency benefits.
According to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Red Hat, firms are well on their way to pursuing automation with security, efficiency and customer demands in mind. Furthermore, 99% of decision makers report multiple technology and business benefits from their automation software investments, including improved security, improved integration and faster innovation.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, aided by the upstream Ansible community, is uniquely poised to help customers progress along this automation journey. CIOs are looking for ways to holistically automate and unify IT departments, driving greater efficiency, expediting innovation and embracing all parts of a hybrid “multi-cloud” environment. Ansible Automation Platform being named among the leaders in the The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020.
Ansible Automation Platform: A foundation for the automated enterprise
Initially used for configuration management, Ansible has evolved into Ansible Automation Platform, a full enterprise-class solution for the hybrid cloud that covers automation across multiple domains and use cases:
- Infrastructure provisioning and configuration management
- Networking
- Application development and deployment
- Security automation and configuration compliance
- Cross-domain orchestration
- Self-service enablement
Ansible’s simplicity, flexibility and ease-of-use has fostered a large and enthusiastic community of individual and corporate contributors as well as users. This community comes together annually at AnsibleFest to share their experiences and build in-demand skills around open source components and Ansible Automation Platform.
Guest speaker Glenn O’Donnell from Forrester will be sharing ideas on the best ways for IT executives and automation architects to navigate from task-based automation into a full strategic automation approach. Mary Johnston Turner of IDC will join theCUBE to discuss management trends as automation continues to evolve in a cloud-native world.
AnsibleFest 2020
The Ansible Automation Platform team is optimistic about the future for automation and is taking steps to support our customers now. Join the Ansible community, hear directly from customers and learn what’s new in Ansible Automation Platform at AnsibleFest Virtual Experience, beginning Tuesday, October 13.
Partners harness Ansible Automation Platform to limit complexity
A key component of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio is an extensive partner ecosystem that extends Ansible Automation Platform. This includes certified and supported automation content available through the Platform’s Automation Hub. Currently, there are more than 55 certified and supported Ansible Content Collections that help teams stand up new automation initiatives faster and more predictably.
Partner-driven Ansible Certified Content available on Automation Hub comes from Red Hat partners such as Cisco, F5, Google Cloud, Microsoft and NetApp. In addition, a rich set of ecosystem integrations help teams execute automation seamlessly within IT environments.
In the next five years, we will see corporate cultures continue to migrate to an automation-driven, digital business approach. As companies seek to compete in their markets and capitalize on emerging opportunities, those with strong, mature automation processes will be better positioned to take advantage of opportunities because they’ll be enabled to take action faster, more predictably and more efficiently. Automation is positioned to advance a new way of working and as continue to serve as a key supporting technology for digital transformation.
