Ivanti Automation Links IT Service Management and Security Operations

Ivanti, which describes itself as unifying IT to manage and secure the digital workplace, has made Ivanti Automation generally available. The product automates tasks and connects third-party technologies with Ivanti's own portfolio: operational security, unified endpoint management, IT asset management and service management, plus its identity management products. Ivanti customers, new and existing, can use it free of charge to integrate Ivanti products. The company says it lets IT operations and security teams automate routine manual work and coordinate it across IT silos, so organisations get a faster return on the technology and resources they already have.

Ian Aitchison, senior product director at Ivanti, said IT departments are running ever more complex hybrid environments with fewer resources than before. Ivanti Automation, he said, is meant to free them from slow manual tasks that keep them from strategic projects. By bringing processes together across the IT organisation, he argued, the product improves collaboration and productivity, lifts business performance, aligns processes more closely and reduces risk. Offering the standard version to every Ivanti customer at no cost, he added, lets customers see the benefits of automation quickly and easily.

What the product covers

Ivanti Automation runs on a single platform and simplifies the infrastructure, cloud and workspace processes needed to deliver IT services to the business. It works across Ivanti's products, giving IT departments automated workflows for unified management. The same environment can automate many on-premises infrastructure processes and tools as well as several public cloud services, including Amazon and Microsoft Azure, where rules and policies for provisioning services and granting users access to cloud services can be set up quickly. Third-party technologies connect through ready-made connectors and add-ons in the Ivanti Marketplace.

According to Ivanti, organisations using the product can:

• automate routine configuration, provisioning and upgrades with more than 300 built-in automation tasks;
• cut the time taken to fulfil requests and resolve incidents dramatically, because actions across toolsets no longer wait for a person to be available and make a decision;
• manage complex hybrid environments more simply by building powerful runbook sequences with little effort;
• lower risk and tighten security with predictable, audit-friendly processes that enforce policy and help prevent human error.

Ivanti also points to Gartner's view that automation can reduce the cost of infrastructure and operations (I&O) and make it more effective. In Gartner's account, organisations start by cutting their own costs, or moving staff to more valuable work, and becoming more efficient. As their automation matures, they look more at how it can raise service quality, for instance through speed, by processing transactions faster, and through standardisation, by making IT infrastructure more reliable.