<p>Conventional wisdom says that automation is one of those "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" projects that, for the lucky few who can buy in, will eventually make in-house IT obsolete. But conventional wisdom is wrong: Automation is affordable, and it's not going cost you your job. More Infrastructure InsightsWebcasts More &gt;&gt;White Papers More &gt;&gt;Reports More &gt;&gt;</p><p>It's easy to see why some of us worry. In manufacturing, automation translates directly into staffing cuts -- if Detroit auto assembly line workers could have nixed the robots, they sure would have. But if you're resisting IT automation because you're afraid of becoming redundant, stop. You're not only hurting your company's bottom line, you're risking just what you're trying to avoid.</p><p>The fact is, computers respond more quickly to changing conditions than people can ever hope to. And if we can detect infrastructure problems in real time, we can orchestrate a response that occurs before anyone notices. A "faster than human" action may in itself generate a concrete ROI, depending on the transactional load and value of the application in question. If a server that processes customer orders at a rate of 100 per minute, at an average value of $20 per order, is down for 15 minutes before IT notices and responds, that's a $30,000 outage. Even if 75% of users come back later to place those orders, that's still $7,500 of bottom-line revenue, plus whatever difficult-to-quantify value your CEO places on customer irritation. That outage just gave IT a black eye and may make the business look twice at an infrastructure-as-a-service provider that promises five-nines uptime and strong SLAs.</p><p>Unfortunately, I still see IT pros failing to champion automation projects. Nearly half, 43%, of respondents to our 2013 Virtualization Management Survey cited "no perceived value to decision-makers" as the major barrier to an automation project. Is this lack of perceived value real and based on an honest analysis, or is it the result of IT being shortsighted?</p><p><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/infrastructure/management/automation-is-good-for-the-business-and/240148699">Keep reading...</a></p>