Exploring the Role of Automation in Systems Administration: Current Trends and Future Prospects

• Robotic process automation (RPA) is the use of computers to automate back office processes.
• It is designed to free up humans from low-value-added, repetitive tasks.
• With a bot, you can focus on your creative and ingenuity tasks.
• In many cases, RPA can also perform regulatory compliance activities.
• Banks typically receive thousands of account closure requests each month, due to failure to provide documents.
• With the help of RPA, the bank can automate these tasks and ensure accuracy.
• The software bots will schedule automated phone calls and follow up with the customer to ensure they submit the required documents.
• RPA can integrate different systems and help bridge integration gaps.
• Bots are easy to deploy and update, and they are a good choice for enterprises that rely on legacy systems.
• The bot will synchronize data and processes without the need for human intervention.
• RPA is used in sales teams to automate administrative tasks, such as updating customer relationship management (CRM) systems and billing systems.
• The healthcare industry is another example of a company that benefits from RPA.
• The use of a robot in a hospital or a medical setting can improve patient outcomes.
• RPA technology can integrate different systems.
• Enterprises that rely on multiple systems and third-party websites can deploy a bot to handle their business operations.
• RPA tools can help in patient appointment bookings.
• The use of RPA technology in healthcare helps in improving the quality of patient care.
• It frees up healthcare staff from repetitive tasks and human error.
• It also reduces the time and cost of administrative tasks, which is vital in the healthcare industry.
• Using RPA, healthcare professionals can spend more time on their core tasks and focus on their clients.
• By implementing an automated workflow, healthcare professionals can increase their productivity and reduce costs.
• The global RPA market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 32.8% from 2021 to 2028, according to the Robotic Process Automation Market Size Report.
• There is a discord for RPA enthusiasts.
• RPA is user-friendly and inexpensive.
• Non-technical employees can teach bot-based automation to perform previously manual tasks.
• The software allows you to integrate RPA into a larger automated workflow.

• Automation in healthcare promotes improved efficiency, accuracy, and patient outcomes.
• Automation processes can make healthcare professionals’ jobs easier and free up their time for more important tasks.
• Automation can lead to cost savings, reduce errors, and improve patient safety.
• Automation can help with monitoring and tracking patients and their health conditions, reducing or eliminating the need for manual input.
• The use of automation can help reduce the likelihood of patient infection and the spread of illnesses.
• Automation can create a more personalized and targeted experience for each patient, leading to better health outcomes.
• Automated systems can provide instant access to information, which can reduce wait times and improve patient satisfaction.
• Robotic process automation can help healthcare providers manage medical claims more efficiently.
• The use of automation can help healthcare providers to collect better data for research.
• Automation can help healthcare providers to handle large amounts of data more efficiently and accurately.
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help healthcare providers to make smarter diagnoses, discover new treatments, and provide more personalized care.
• Automation can help reduce the administrative workload on healthcare professionals, allowing them to focus on patient care.
• The use of automation in pharmaceutical manufacturing can help to reduce the risk of contamination and improve production efficiency.
• Automation can help with the handling and tracking of medical supplies, improving supply chain management.
• Automated systems can help healthcare providers to identify trends and patterns that can aid in diagnosis and treatment planning.
• The use of automation can help healthcare providers to manage medical records and patient data more efficiently and securely.
• Automation in healthcare can help providers to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends in patient care.
• Robotics can enable faster and more precise surgical procedures.

Reddit comments:

• A user expresses gratitude for the insights shared in the article and notes the immense potential of automation to improve efficiency and accuracy in healthcare (1 karma).
• Another user thanks for sharing this informative discussion on the benefits of automation in the healthcare industry (1 karma).

• The webpage is a discussion on Reddit about the benefits of automation.
• The original post asks what are the most important benefits of automation, and several commenters weigh in on their thoughts.
• One user (16 karma) notes that automation can reduce repetitive, exhausting work and improve safety by eliminating common mistakes made by humans.
• Another user (1 karma) mentions that automating systems can improve consistency, as they do not get distracted or cut corners.
• Other users mention benefits such as more analytical and strategic work, improved productivity, reduced costs, increased accuracy, and more manageable supervisions of tasks.
• One user (8 karma) provides a list of benefits that come with automating computer operations, such as improving productivity, accuracy, manageability, and transparency, as well as reducing costs and eliminating routine actions.
• Another user (2 karma) thinks it would be cool to automate corona testing.
• Some of the comments devolve into discussions of capitalism and occupation, which are not relevant to the initial query.

Overall, the discussion on the webpage provides some insight into the benefits of automation, focusing primarily on how it improves productivity, quality, consistency, accuracy, manageability, transparency, and safety. Additionally, it is suggested that automating computer operations can be a relatively easy process with the right tools. However, the conversation is not specific to systems administration, as it is only tangentially related to the initial query.

Not used in article

• Relevance: The webpage discusses the pros and cons of automation, which could be helpful to answer the query on exploring the role of automation in systems administration.
• Importance: 7
• Pro: If automation is implemented along with something like a Basic Income, people won’t have to work to survive and will be free to pursue their interests. (6 karma)
• Con: It is unlikely that a Basic Income will be implemented before many jobs are automated, leading to blame being put on automation. (6 karma)
• Pro: There will be no need to work anymore, which means everyone will have enough free time to pursue their interests. (2 karma)
• Con: There will be no reason to do anything anymore, leading to boredom and a lack of purpose, possibly causing depression or over-consumerism. (2 karma)
• Counter to Con: There are many reasons to do things other than money. (2 karma)
• Negative impact: many people already specialized in one profession or another may not be able to contribute anything if their skills are not superior to those of automation, leading to entrenchment and disappointment. (2 karma)
• Negative impact: younger generations in the middle of studying may be discouraged to see their skills become redundant. (2 karma)
• Counter to negative impacts: Even with these possible drawbacks, the impact is still better than what we have now. (1 karma)
• Counter to negative impacts: Human civilization has continued to adapt to technological advancement by integrating technology, so this will continue in the future. (3 karma)
• Automation of harmful tasks and replacement of hard labor tasks is positive as well as long as it is safe and decreases the number of accidents. (3 karma)
• The phobia of robots taking away jobs is irrational since humans have replaced labor with alternatives throughout history and it is the sign of progress. (3 karma)
• Historical loss of skilled jobs due to automation is an example of a short-term problem. (1 karma)
• Industrial Revolution was good in spite of the short-term loss of working class status for skilled workers. (1 karma)
• Safety is an important benefit of automation, especially for manufacturing tasks. (3 karma)
• Automation generates single points of failure, creating more vulnerability to system failure. (2 karma)

Notes:

• Automation may allow for more time outside of work to pursue individual interests or live life, though potentially causing boredom or lack of purpose.
• Many people may be left without opportunities after automation for tasks outcompeted by technology and have no way

Not used in article

Not used in article

• The webpage is a discussion thread on Reddit titled “Is Azure AD the future of System administration?” with a total of 27 comments.
• One user comments that Azure AD is going to be huge going forward, and AD can be run fully in the cloud, eliminating the need to deploy on-premise servers.
• Another user asks how accountants will use cloud-based solutions as Quickbooks online and various other packages may not be adequate, to which other users suggest solutions like running an RDP server in Azure for Quickbooks or using SAAS accounting packages like Dynamics F&O, Dynamics Business Central, Sage Intacct, etc.
• Some users recommend learning a variety of technologies, including both cloud-based and on-premise, while one user points out the importance of learning the underlying concepts rather than just focusing on specific technologies, as those may become outdated.
• Several users mention the use of automation in managing Azure AD and Intune, particularly through the use of PowerShell scripts.
• One user notes that hybrid environments, with a mix of cloud-based and on-premise solutions, are still common in many organizations due to concerns such as CISA requirements, cost, or hardware being at the end of its life.
• Some users express skepticism about cloud-only solutions, suggesting that many organizations may shift back to partially on-premise solutions within the foreseeable future due to perceived outages, mismanagement of accounts, and spiraling costs.
• Other users argue that cloud-only is the destination and hybrid is a stepping stone to get there, with cloud-only becoming more viable as incompatibilities are fixed, and more organizations shift in that direction.
• One user points out that Microsoft has no plans to replace AD with AAD, and that they complement each other, with AAD only working with Windows 10 or later and no support for servers prior to Windows 2019.
• Users generally agree that learning Azure and cloud-based solutions is important, with one user even suggesting that the AZ-104 certification exam can make someone very marketable, but that it’s also important to have a well-rounded knowledge of both on-premise and cloud technologies.

Not used in article

Not used in article

• mRemoteNG is an open-source, tabbed, multi-protocol, remote connections manager.
• Recommended by “Oliviamcc,” who claims that it is better than Putty, Citrix, VNC, and RDC.
• MailFlow Monitor is a cloud-based tool that sends alerts as soon as there are any issues with email flow.
• TreeSize Free helps users find and free up precious disk space.
• PDQ Inventory and Deploy is a software deployment tool used to keep Windows PCs up-to-date without bothering end-users.
• Clean is an application that automatically moves desktop files into monthly folders each day (Mac).
• trace32.exe and cmtrace.exe are part of Microsoft’s SCCM suite that can open very large log files and display them in real-time.
• ISPConfig hosting control panel is an open-source hosting control panel with a renovated UI and many new features.
• BlueScreenView scans all the minidump files created during a blue screen of death crash and displays information in one table.
• Windows System Control Center (WSCC) acts as a repository for various utility suites, such as DNS Audit, Ping Scanner, Port Scanner, among others.
• Spiceworks Free HelpDesk and Networking Monitoring software are recommended by countless IT Pros over the years.
• Monitor Active Directory Group Membership Change is a PowerShell script that monitors AD groups and sends email notifications if any changes occurred.
• ADModify.NET is a tool primarily utilized by Exchange and AD administrators to facilitate user attribute modifications in bulk.
• RSAT tools can manage any aspect of Windows infrastructure without requiring RDP.
• Attack Surface Analyzer takes a snapshot of Windows system state before and after the installation of product(s) and displays changes to a number of key elements of the Windows attack surface.
• AWS offer a free tier that allows users to create their practice environment, replicate problems, and learn a lot.
• The Dell Warranty Checker permits users to check warranties on Dell systems.
• NetCrunch Tools 2.0 contains over ten essential IP tools for administrators, including DNS Audit, Ping Scanner, Network Services Scanner, among others.
• SQL Fiddle is a tool for easy online testing and sharing of database problems and their solutions.
• Regexr is an online tool to learn, build, and test Regular Expressions.
• Switch Miner is a port-discovery tool that can help locate all the devices connected to any switch.
• LetsMonitor.org is a free service that alerts users when their site certificates are misconfigured or nearing expiration.
• RBLmon is

Not used in article

• Reddit users automate tasks that they perform repeatedly
• PowerShell and batch scripting are commonly used for automation
• The tasks that Reddit users automated included:
  • Daily kick idle sessions off AWS & vCenter consoles, kick idle AD account sessions from Prod Windows servers (karma: 9)
  • Daily snapshots older than X days deleted (karma: 9)
  • Weekly vSphere and AWS Environment Summaries sent as an HTML email to managers (karma: 9)
  • Weekly “Resource hogs” and “under performers” server summary email for admins and app owners (karma: 9)
  • Weekly VMware vMotion, DRS action and events summary for admins (karma: 9)
  • Monthly compliance checks (karma: 9)
  • Monthly zombie checks (karma: 9)
  • Monthly vmtools, open vm tools, and AWS tools version checks (karma: 9)
  • Annual Growth Report (karma: 9)
  • WSUS Old Patch Cleanup (karma: 4)
  • Software installations from a webpage (karma: 4)
  • Attempted fix of machines not checking into WSUS (karma: 4)
  • Automated tickets when low on disk space (karma: 4)
  • Automated ticket resolution for people who enter BitLocker tickets (karma: 4)
  • Automated tickets when machines haven’t checked into the domain in xxx amount of days (and machines are disabled) (karma: 4)
  • WSUS reporting (karma: 4)
  • Automatically adding machines to SnipeIT if they’re not there already (karma: 4)
  • Foreman -> WDS -> Puppet -> Powershell-DSC pipeline for automatic Windows server setups, with native Puppet to automate Linux server setups (karma: 3)
  • Rundeck which uses WinRM or SSH to execute ad-hoc scripts on systems, and Ansible which is mostly used for ad-hoc migrations and bulk reconfiguration of different services (karma: 3)
  • Computer setups with PowerShell. (karma: 2)
  • Build a workflow rule in the PSA to swat tickets back to tier 1 if they didn’t already log at least X minutes in the ticket (karma: 2)
  • Everything related to our infrastructure. If it’s not in git, it doesn’t exist. (karma:

Not used in article

Not used in article

💭  Looking into

Comparison of current and future state of automation in systems administration

💭  Looking into

3 key benefits of automation in systems administration