5 benefits of IT automation for the public sector

Citizens are demanding better performance and experiences from public sector services, but these institutions must balance meeting demand with maintaining security and governance. Here are 5 ways IT automation can help the public sector support these digital transformation efforts.

Automation brings efficiency benefits to the entire end-to-end application process. Automated application management helps teams provision resources, make configuration changes, and run commands across a variety of environments. 

As a result, development teams can:

• Focus time and resources on coding new and improved services
• Deliver enhancements to departments or agencies faster. 
• Overcome complexity
• Improve accountability and compliance

Simplicity is critical in a public sector environment consisting of many departments and agencies that provide a broad range of services to citizens, such as pensions and benefits, health and social care, transportation, environmental, treasury and finance, policing and justice, defense, interior, foreign affairs, infrastructure, architecture, and operations. 

Automating the technology tasks and decisions associated with each of these services with a consistent, easy-to-use, and reliable solution is key to simplified management. Additionally, automation can help skilled staff move between agencies, keeping talent in the public sector.

Agentless automation solutions, such as Red Hat® Ansible Automation Platform®, eliminate the need to install, manage, and support software on each managed host while reducing risk of library conflicts—without  increasing the system’s security footprint or attack profile.

Automation makes it easier for IT teams to collaborate across networking, development, infrastructure, applications, or security roles. As a result, administrators can focus on efforts that deliver more value to the organization.

A common automation language is key to effective participation in projects. For example, Ansible Playbooks and roles are written in human-readable language, reducing miscommunication and delays. As a result, teams can work together more productively, with fewer mistakes — and fewer repetitive tasks.

Public sector institutions manage complex, sensitive data across a variety of departments and services, making centralized management and oversight a challenge. In addition, personnel changes can make it difficult to provide consistent access to data. Control over access rights must  be reliable, consistent, and easy to manage. 

Ansible Automation Platform provides several capabilities to coordinate your enterprise security and compliance systems, including:

• Investigation: Collect logs across firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and other security systems to support triage activities by security information and event management systems (SIEMs).
• Threat detection: Automatically tune the level of logging and create new IDS rules and new firewall policies to detect threats in less time.
• Incident response: Speed actions like denylisting or allowlisting IP addresses, domains, or traffic and quickly isolate suspicious workloads for further investigation.

While public sector institutions adopt new technology—such as cloud or edge computing—to improve the delivery of citizen services, agencies often still need to maintain and support existing legacy systems to continue providing effective, reliable services to citizens.

Automation helps agencies balance existing and new investments by integrating and orchestrating tasks and processes across devices, platforms, and vendors. As a result, public sector organizations can reduce time to deploy to these hybrid environments, create consistent standards across technologies, reduce operational costs, and free skilled staff to focus on valuable service work.