The 10 Ways to Achieve Data Center Efficiency

Alongside reducing costs, improving efficiency is perhaps the primary objective of almost any chief information officer (CIO). With its costs and an almost endless amount of infrastructure, the modern data center presents a perfect opportunity to streamline, accelerate, and improve processes so that organizations can boost their productivity while decreasing expenses.

Today, many key requirements of data centers are easily automated to improve efficiency. These essentials include everything from the basics of maintaining the premises in which these centers are located to some of their core data-driven tasks such as managing network traffic.

By using tools such as Robotic Process Automation -RPA, CIOs can succeed in accomplishing more while using fewer traditional resources, making these hubs of enterprise activity much more efficient than they are without it in the following areas.

#1. Monitoring

RPA’s dynamic software bots excel at monitoring almost all data center components, from mission-critical ones, including balancing workloads to logistics pertaining to the surrounding environment of this operational necessity. Bots can monitor the systems non-stop without lagging in performance. These capabilities are extremely valuable for ensuring operational stations have the appropriate airflow, temperature, humidity, and power distribution to maintain peak functionality.

#2. Preventive maintenance

In many cases, preventive maintenance naturally follows monitoring since the next step is to equip bots with the ability to remediate—and prevent—any potentially costly concerns. For example, intelligent automation fortified by machine learning can help predict failure or overloads in data center elements to minimize downtime by spinning up virtual machines during network surges.

#3. Human productivity

By automating simple, time-consuming tasks such as monitoring, RPA can enable human employees traditionally assigned these jobs to work on more meaningful activities. For example, they can concentrate on high-value DevOps jobs or planning for business needs.

#4. Load balancing

Load balancing is an integral part of maintaining workload and data center energy efficiency. By analyzing workloads and the capacity of the servers involved in them, bots can dynamically shift workloads as needed to ensure organizations get the performance benefits their users need.

#5. Backups and moving data

A large amount of activity in these workspaces that is vital to IT is based on repetitive functions including issuing backups or replicating data from one place to another. Humans can make these judgment calls, then deploy bots to perform the heavy lifting. In some situations, a Digital Workforce can initiate and carry out the jobs.

#6. Security

Security is a chief requirement of data center infrastructure. Because bots can understand normal usage patterns through monitoring, they can apply this capability and their capacity for proactive execution to detect or minimize the consequences of malware, ransomware, and other forms of attacks—especially when equipped with machine learning.

#7. Scalability

Accounting for scalability is a central part of knowing how to maintain a data center. RPA bots can leverage AI to recognize usage patterns and scale up or down as needed with virtual machines. Doing so enables organizations to save costs associated with these machines when they’re not needed yet also provision them on demand to satisfy users.

#8. Network traffic

Bots are key for optimizing the management of network traffic. Machine learning’s capacity pattern recognition abilities can enable them to determine when networking thresholds are in danger of being exceeded. In such situations, they can re-direct traffic to ensure there’s enough bandwidth for access necessities. This heightened response time is typically quicker than a human’s response.

#9. Human error

Implicit to almost all of these ways in which organizations can deploy RPA to increase data center efficiency is the removal of human error. Unlike humans, bots can be 100% accurate, which minimizes costly downtime while ensuring operations are flowing smoothly.

#10. Regulatory compliance

The normalization of operations bots provide is also ideal for ensuring regulatory compliance. Bots can standardize procedures in accordance with regulations so that organizations aren’t prone to expensive consequences from non-adherence such as costly fees.

Optimizing operations

Automation is the means by which an organization can make sure it passes its data center health check. Combining RPA with aspects of AI allows companies to streamline and accelerate the activities that sustain—and deliver enterprise value—in these workspaces. By diminishing costs and increasing productivity, the Digital Workforce approach is one everyone managing these operational spaces should consider.