Five Trends that will Drive the Use of IT Automation by Australian Businesses in 2025

It’s been a big year for automation in Australia. Against a backdrop of widespread efficiency drives, the technology has proven its effectiveness and value across a broad array of use cases, easing the administrative burden on lean operational teams and helping them to absorb growing business-as-usual demands without a linear increase in costs.

With pressures on teams and organisations remaining, automation is set to play an even bigger role in helping organisations and operations teams navigate the challenges of a new year. What follows is our top five predictions for how we see this playing out.

The push to keep operations simple and cost-optimised

Many organisations kicked off simplification and cost optimisation programs of work over the past year, responding to pressure to ‘do more with less’. Within these initiatives, we saw companies move workloads from cloud back to on-premises infrastructure as a way to save operational costs. We anticipate this continuing – and expanding. Automation provides a repeatable and less personnel-intensive way of repatriating those workloads from cloud infrastructure. Automation was often used to transition workloads into the cloud en masse and will play a similar role in movements in the other direction.

We will also see increased platformisation in the automation space, with Australian organisations looking to either streamline the number of automation tools that they use to oversee their environments, or to abstract complexity away from these setups entirely. Currently, every vendor ecosystem comes with its own automation tool. This means organisations end up with a large array of tools that work with only one vendor ecosystem and have to maintain specialised knowledge and skills internally to use each. Organisations want to be able to consolidate all of this into one tool, or to run an orchestration layer on top of all the existing automation tools so they can be accessed and controlled through a single pane of glass.

Automation-as-a-service built on Red Hat’s Ansible automation platform can be a huge game-changer here, because it is vendor-agnostic and can work with many different tools and customer setups. Managed services can bring automation seamlessly to more aspects of an organisation’s IT operations, with a simple cost structure, and without the overheads associated with going it alone.

 

More VM migrations

Virtualisation has dominated the last decade as an efficient way to host workloads, even those in public cloud, but changes in the hypervisor market in 2024 have turned at least one popular ecosystem into a “burning platform” that may require replacement sooner rather than later. Where those workloads should go is an open question: whether it’s to the cloud, into an alternative on-premises hypervisor, into a managed service or something else, this is something that infrastructure teams are trying to work through.

What’s clear is that those seeking to replace their hypervisor software with something else will need to look at some sort of automation tools to perform that migration for them. Regardless of which option they choose, the repeatable process of migrating workloads into new VM software or onto new services is likely to be much easier with the assistance of automations. These automations may take the form of Red Hat Ansible automation playbooks that can be defined once and reused many times. The more that can be automated, the easier it will be to meet transition timelines.

 

Automated actions based on insights

Over the past year or more, there’s been a specific focus among organisations from a data analytics perspective of putting in tools that are capable of ingesting vast amounts of raw data and producing actionable insights. To date, these actionable insights have helped overwhelmed operations teams to narrow and apply their finite time to only the most pressing problems in their environment. We expect this focus on actionable insights will continue in 2025 but go a step further, with insights triggering automated machine-based actions as well.

This is starting to occur in security domains such as vulnerability management. Managed services offerings are emerging that combine the capabilities of multiple tools in one platform that can manage the entire process, from detecting the vulnerability or misconfiguration, to generating a service ticket, and prioritising and executing the remediation such as through a rollback or by applying a server patch. The end-to-end process can be completely automated, with a high degree of accuracy. This is enabling organisations to move forward with this kind of automation.

The timing of these advanced automation capabilities could not be better. Organisations are being driven to ‘do more with less’, while at the same time, the complexity of systems means the amount of data and alerts being generated is more than a human can process or action. Automation will help to close this critical gap in 2025.

 

GenAI will boost infrastructure management

GenAI has had wide-ranging impacts on the Australian business landscape in 2024. That the trend will continue is no surprise – but we expect to see it play a bigger role in infrastructure automation.

For example, a time-intensive task in infrastructure automation currently is defining the playbooks that specify the list of tasks that the automation is to carry out. GenAI can now be used to create these playbooks using a single prompt, allowing organisations to create new playbooks quickly, make slight tweaks via human oversight, and then apply them in a repeatable, automated fashion to their infrastructure footprints, saving hours per playbook.

Using a specialised automation partner to do this can further speed up the creation and application of these automations. We anticipate GenAI will further make its mark on IT infrastructure management across 2025.

 

Automation at the network edge

The edge is the frontier of the network and of organisations’ environments, and it is a constantly moving target. Extending automation to edge-based deployments is likely to emerge as a trend in 2025.

Given the challenges of working at the edge – such as limited connectivity, equipment form factor and compute capacity – automation that does not require a large edge footprint, such as requiring software agents to be installed on edge devices, is likely to find favour among organisations. This will be a space to watch evolve.

 

About the author

Uros Zajc is a Solutions Architect and Red Hat Practice Lead for Atturra. He has over 15 years of technical experience in architecture, design, deployment and support of datacentre infrastructure, cloud, applications and migrations. Uros is an experienced pre-sales solution architect who engages in all aspects of the sales cycle, as well as being a subject matter expert in post-sales deployments.