Automation & Scripting, IT Atlas

Overview

Automation ranges from a PowerShell or Bash script to full orchestration platforms and event driven runbooks. The highest value targets are tasks that are frequent, error prone and well understood, onboarding, offboarding, provisioning, reporting and remediation.

Automation is production code. It needs version control, review, testing, error handling, idempotency and a named owner; scripts on an admin's desktop are a single point of failure.

Security considerations

Store automation credentials in a secret manager and scope them per task; never hard code them.
Log automated actions to the same standard as human actions, and require approval for destructive operations.

Related topics

Infrastructure as Code

Defining infrastructure declaratively in version controlled files so environments are reproducible and changes are reviewable.

SOAR

Security Orchestration, Automation and Response executes playbooks across tools to enrich, decide and act consistently.

Service & Workload Identity

Non human identities used by applications, scripts and automation, usually the least governed and most over privileged accounts in an estate.

IT Operations

The disciplines that keep a technology estate available, secure, documented and improving, day after day, not project by project.

APIs

Programmatic interfaces that let systems exchange data and invoke functions across boundaries, and the main integration surface of modern IT.

Linux

The dominant server operating system family, managed by configuration management and increasingly present as a managed endpoint.

Integration Platforms

Middleware and iPaaS services that connect applications through APIs, message queues, events and scheduled data flows.

Power Platform

Low code application, automation and analytics tooling that requires governance because business users create production dependencies with it.