Infrastructure management firms are aggressively exploring and implementing automation solutions, says a healthcare, managed services company.

Sapphire Health believes cloud-readiness and containerization adoption and migration are among the reasons that its solutions for clients should now be engineered for automation. Alleviating the hassle of repetitive tasks is one of the back-stories, but it’s not all about that, the firm says. Workflows that can’t be handled efficiently with manual methods are equally important benefactors.

“It’s more about an idea of a business requirement from its origin all the way through its implementation,” said Mike Todaro (pictured right), senior consultant at managed services health company Sapphire Health. “It’s less about individual tasks.”

Todaro and Eric Pennington (pictured, left), director of solutions engineering at the company, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AnsibleFest 2021. They discussed the reasons an organization would opt for automation. (* Disclosure below.)

Saving money with automation

Todaro and Pennington see multiple benefits of automation.

While Todaro, who is the senior Epic cache expert (Epic is a major health-records software package), believes that “automating repetitive tasks is the kiddie end of the pool,” Pennington thinks the thrust toward IT automation in the health vertical is driven by error-reduction, primarily, but also services-level cost savings obtained by automating tedious and repetitive tasks. The company is heavily involved in migrations of AIX (a 1980s IBM operating system) to IBM’s current Red Hat products, including Ansible.

“If there’s a repetitive task that’s being performed over and over again, if there’s an opportunity to automate it, that’s going to save us time,” Pennington stated. “It’s going to provide an opportunity for us to focus on more value-add services for the client.” Costs for the client get shaved in other words.

Todaro, on the other hand, believes automating repetitive tasks isn’t the main beneficiary of automation, like that provided by IBM’s Ansible: “That’s how we sell the idea to people who just don’t get the concept yet,” he told Furrier. “There are workflows that really aren’t feasible outside of automation.”

The streamlining of a corporate process could be an example, he suggested: “So, I have a new hire. I’ve got to provision an account across multiple systems. I’ve got to do it in single sign on; they need home directories; they need building accesses we need to generate. You got to generate badges for these people.”

Traditionally, each of those processes would be an individual workflow.

“You have to take your sheet to this guy; take your sheet to this guy; here’s my new hire form,” he explained. However, Todaro reckons automation allows you to combine all the workflows: “Let the automation move it through all of these,” he said.

That also clearly saves costs, which is Pennington’s angle.

But it’s mistake-prevention that they both agree is key.

“If you write and build your script and debug it, the script runs, it doesn’t make mistakes. I make mistakes; the script doesn’t,” Todaro said. “We end up spending less time on these repetitive, unnecessary tasks. We guarantee the correctness of them, or we do a better job of guaranteeing the correctness of them. And all of that ends up saving money in the long run. This screams automate.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during AnsibleFest 2021. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AnsibleFest. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE