Automating IT Has Become One of the Most Compelling Use Cases for RPA

As CIOs seek to use robotic process automation (RPA) to help their organizations’ business units automate inefficient manual processes, most know they can’t afford to overlook their own IT departments. In fact, applying RPA to IT processes has emerged as one of the most effective ways in which CIOs and their teams can meet digital transformation goals and mandates. Furthermore, IT process automations can provide compelling proof points that help secure executive backing for broader, enterprise-wide automation initiatives.

Just like business unit employees, IT workers are inundated with many manual tasks that detract from the time they can devote to more valuable activities. Labor-intensive IT tasks range from onboarding employees to infrastructure management to responding to IT help desk tickets.

The demands on IT professionals are escalating along with the complexity, scope, and criticality of the applications and infrastructure they manage. Complicating matters: the sudden, pandemic-driven increases in remote workforces are introducing still more IT challenges and workloads.

Every IT professional typically performs a range of manual processes. Some of the key roles and representative processes include:

• IT service desk agent – resetting user passwords, archiving Exchange mailboxes, adding users to distribution lists, etc.
• QA engineer – deploying test servers, reverting environments to initial states, generating test result reports, etc.
• Cybersecurity engineer – running security scans, generating vulnerabilities reports, running audits on resource owners’ access, etc.
• Database administrator – backing up databases, adding user rights to databases, migrating databases, etc.
• Cloud and infrastructure engineer – deploying new database and application servers, adding and removing user access to servers, patching applications, etc.

These examples represent just a slice of the functions IT professionals must perform, often multiple times each day. Despite their scope and variety, however, many IT processes and best practices are fairly consistent from organization to organization, as are the major platforms and applications that the processes engage.

That commonality opens the door for RPA solutions to provide templates for many workflows as well as pre-tested integrations with many popular platforms. With such out-of-the-box solutions, IT departments don’t have to start their internal RPA initiatives from scratch.

UiPath, for example, offers more than 500 IT activities and templates that span virtually every popular platform, application, and public cloud, including those from Microsoft, IBM, Citrix, Amazon, and VMware, among many others. For example, the UiPath Marketplace currently contains more than 80 automation listings for interactions with Microsoft platforms – everything from a Microsoft Azure Forms Recognizer to software robots that can support processes involving Microsoft 365 Activities for Excel Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook Mail & Calendar, and Planner.

IT professionals can simply download UiPath and partner solutions from the UiPath Marketplace, follow the instructions for customizing them as necessary, deploy them in their environments, and immediately begin gaining the benefits of workflow automations.

For further information about how the extensive UiPath portfolio of RPA solutions can help automate inefficient processes throughout your IT department, visit their website.