Is your IT team drowning in repetitive tasks that slow down progress and drain resources? When managing an ecosystem of software, devices, and endpoints, just keeping up with basic troubleshooting routines can feel like an uphill battle.
But IT automation isn't just a trendy buzzword; it’s a must-have for enabling operational efficiency. At our recent IT Nation Connect conference one key insight was clear: incorporating AI capabilities and automation in IT operations is a necessity. For IT teams looking to scale capacity and improve quality of support without necessarily investing in additional headcount, integrating automation capabilities into daily operations is an essential strategy.
In this article, we'll explore the 10 most impactful tasks MSPs and IT departments should consider automating to maximize efficiency.
Key takeaways
- IT automation can reduce operational costs by up to one-third, while allowing teams to process more requests and resolve issues faster.
- Over 52% of companies identify IT as the department experiencing the greatest ROI from process automation, with standardized workflows improving service consistency.
- Top IT tasks to automate include processes that follow predictable patterns and are susceptible to human error, like missed steps or delays when done manually, like patch management, scripting, and network monitoring.
- Automation in IT strengthens an organization’s security posture by ensuring consistency in critical tasks or routine maintenance, reducing vulnerabilities and minimizing risk exposure across the network.
- Automated IT software like ConnectWise RMM scales with organizational growth, enabling teams to manage more endpoints without needing to increase headcount.
What is IT automation?
IT automation is the practice of using software tools, scripts and technologies to handle repetitive IT tasks with little to no manual input. IT teams can set up predefined workflows that execute routine tasks like patch management, system monitoring, and incident resolution automatically, saving time and effort.
The core goal of IT automation is to improve efficiency, consistency, and service quality across an organization. For example, an IT team might deploy automation scripts to proactively detect and proactively resolve network issues before they impact end users. Automation can accelerate software deployments or streamline cloud resource management, shifting the focus of IT teams from putting out fires to strategic initiatives that drive business value and customer satisfaction.
Benefits of IT automation
According to Salesforce, over 52% of respondents identify IT as the department that sees the greatest return on investment (ROI) from process automation. But how does implementing IT automation translate into tangible benefits? Here are some of the most impactful benefits businesses gain when they automate IT tasks:
Reduced human error
Manual processes are prone to mistakes—even for the most experienced technicians. Mistakes, service delays and errors can lead to vulnerabilities. IT automation ensures tasks are executed the same way every time, ensuring consistency, accuracy and reducing the risk of costly errors.
Improved efficiency
When automating routine activities like software updates, incident triage, and basic troubleshooting, what once took hours can now be completed in minutes. Automating IT software tasks streamlines operations, accelerates resolution times, and helps teams handle more requests without sacrificing quality.
Increased scalability
As organizations grow, so does the complexity of the IT environment. For IT teams, that often means more devices to manage, more tickets to resolve, and more potential points of failure. With automation in place, your systems can scale without requiring a proportional increase in IT staff—making it easier to manage growth without compromising service levels.
More time for strategic initiatives
A team freed from repetitive tasks can focus on higher-level projects that require human strategic thinking and relationship building. IT professionals can shift from constantly resetting passwords or updating systems to working on security enhancements or developing innovative solutions and strategic plans that leverage their creativity and deliver more business value.
Higher quality of service for clients
A standardized process is inherently more reliable and consistent. No matter which team member initially handles a support request or when it arrives, a consistent workflow ensures maximum quality of service for clients and end-users.
For more examples of how IT automation can help your team work smarter, download our eBook, Remote Monitoring and Management: The Key to Proactive, Efficient IT Service Delivery.
10 common IT tasks that teams can automate
According to Gartner, organizations lowered operational costs by one-third by incorporating automation in their operational processes. However, to implement an efficient strategy to automate IT tasks, it’s essential to identify which ones must receive priority.
But where should you start? Below are ten critical IT tasks that can benefit from automation, offering the highest return on investment in terms of time saved, reduced errors, and improved service delivery.
1. Patch management
Patch management is critical to keep systems secure and up to date, as even one missed update can compromise a whole network. With this said, the sheer scale of modern IT environments makes manual patching unrealistic and error prone. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of endpoints need constant attention, and updates arrive from operating systems, third-party applications, and security vendors, each on various schedules.
Automated patch management tools simplify this whole process. For example, rather than trying to find updates, automated IT solutions can proactively scan for missing patches and identify which devices are in need of an update. Prior to rollout, you can test patches on a subset or controlled group of devices before rolling out to all endpoints, minimizing downtime/conflicts, and then verify each installation to track patch compliance updates. This frees up techs to focus on addressing exceptions rather than routine updates.
The security benefits of patch management automation shouldn’t be ignored, either. Automated patching shrinks your exposure window, cutting off opportunities for threat actors to exploit known vulnerabilities. Some automated patch management platforms also come with integrated expert review helping to speed up response times to newly disclosed vulnerabilities.
2. Asset discovery
You can't protect what you don't know exists. Shadow IT, forgotten devices, and unsanctioned software quietly expand attack surfaces, making asset discovery essential for network security. However, in modern infrastructures, IT assets are constantly changing. Devices connect and disconnect daily, new cloud services spin up without warning, and remote employees may add personal devices to networks.
Automated asset discovery continuously scans for infrastructure changes in real time, cataloging every piece of hardware and software the moment it appears. Advanced tools can also map relationships between assets, identifying new devices on the network or devices that unexpectedly go offline, to prevent downtime or unusual activity from going unchecked.
This instant visibility helps IT teams respond faster to vulnerabilities and compliance gaps. By integrating automated asset discovery with functions like endpoint management and patch management, as soon as an asset gets identified, it can be monitored and managed effectively without extra effort from IT teams.
3. Network monitoring
Monitoring network health manually can feel like an uphill battle in complex, sprawling environments. Yet, performance drops and outages can seriously harm any service that needs to be available 24/7. Automated network monitoring solutions do more than just detect anomalies in real-time. They can identify bottlenecks, speed troubleshooting, and alert IT teams so they can address problems before they impact business operations.
Automated network monitoring doesn’t just detect live issues, it builds historical context that sharpens future performance. By continuously collecting data points over time, these tools help IT teams identify recurring patterns like bandwidth spikes, packet loss trends, or latency fluctuations.
This information helps teams identify applications, causes of network bottlenecks, and gain deep insights into the behavior of network issues to make adjustments before user experience suffers. This proactive posture turns monitoring from a reactive tool into a strategic asset for network health and efficiency.
4. Endpoint management
Reactive, manual endpoint management quickly becomes unmanageable at scale. Multiple devices require continuous updates and security enforcement, not just for compliance or performance reasons, but to reduce external threats that could cause serious damage.
Automating endpoint management brings control back to IT teams. Devices are discovered the moment they connect to the network, and pre-configured policies can be used to standardize baselines for device settings, software deployments, and access controls. This increases uniformity and eliminating gaps caused by manual oversight.
Real-time health monitoring tracks device performance and flags anomalies as well, like suspiciously long CPU spikes or storage shortages. Automation can resolve common issues automatically and ensure tickets are created with helpful details to speed up troubleshooting, all while reducing the manual workload required to manage so many diverse hardware types.
Remote management is another critical advantage. Whether endpoints are in-office, remote, or hybrid, automation enables seamless remote remediation. IT teams can diagnose and resolve problems without disrupting users or waiting for manual escalation.
5. Incident management
No matter how careful teams are, bad things can still happen. In the IT world, how quickly your incident response team reacts to an event will have a significant impact on total downtime, overall cost, and potential reputational damage. Cybersecurity solutions like SIEM and MDR can be seamlessly integrated into your RMM to help automate the discovery, classification, and prioritization of anomalies to significantly speed up response, containment, and recovery. Not only does this initial response automation dramatically reduce reaction time, it also supports consistent handling of incidents regardless of who's on duty.
Automation also strengthens incident escalation paths. When a complex issue surpasses predefined thresholds or resolution attempts fail, the system can automatically route and engage additional support team members, speeding up their involvement by including ticket history with full diagnostic context. This seamless escalation accelerates handoffs between teams while minimizing ‘ramp up’ time by including crucial information automatically. Coupled with automated status updates to stakeholders, it keeps everyone aligned and focused on resolution during critical incidents to maintain transparency from detection through resolution.
6. Task automation
Routine maintenance keeps IT environments running smoothly, but manual execution drains resources fast. Hyperautomation via AI-enabled capabilities make tasks like ticket triage and generating helpful monitors and scripts possible at scale across thousands of endpoints, accelerating processes while freeing up valuable time and resources.
Modern technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) software can further elevate efficiency and accuracy, as RPA bots can follow predefined workflows to automate entire processes across multiple tools. RPA closes the loop on even complex process flows with unmatched consistency.
7. Backup and disaster recovery
Organizations can’t cut corners when it comes to data protection. If a ransomware or data loss event were to occur, a current and usable backup that will restore data in the timeframe required, is what can ensure a company’s survival.
Automating backup processes is a critical portion of every holistic business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) solution. While human oversight is critically important for testing BCDR plans, automation is critical to ensure that all data is protected for the right retention and frequency no matter where that data is located. Steps like backup integrity verification, backup replication (to cloud or another site), and adding new servers, endpoints, and users of solutions like Microsoft 365 to backup processes are all examples where automation can ensure steps don’t get missed and data does not get lost.
8. Monitoring and alerting
Without effective remote monitoring, problems can hide in plain sight until they cause real damage. But monitoring alone isn’t enough to provide your customers with the confidence and security they demand. That’s where intelligent alerts and automated remediation come together. Instead of bombarding technicians with a flood of fragmented alerts, RMM software includes powerful automation capabilities that can aggregate related events into a single, meaningful, and actionable ticket.
This is further enhanced through intelligent event correlation that analyzes activity across endpoints and systems, recognizing patterns and filtering out false positives. This precision prevents alert fatigue and keeps your technicians focused on genuine the most pressing concerns instead of informational only notices.
Automated monitoring doesn’t stop at detection. If a critical service stops, automation can restart it automatically. If storage capacity runs low, cleanup scripts can free up space without manual intervention. The outcome is a tighter feedback loop between issue detection and resolution.
9. Scripting
Scripting is the backbone of powerful IT automation, transforming repetitive, manual tasks into repeatable, efficient processes that execute exactly as designed.
For IT teams, prebuilt scripts save hours of manual work, like software deployment, applying configuration changes, or running cleanup tasks. Modern AI scripting automation tools can elevate scripting even further, allowing techs to work more creatively and across different scripting languages like PowerShell, batch, and bash based on written prompts.
Custom and pre-defined variables like device type, location, or status can be factored in automatically, allowing a single script to address multiple scenarios. Integrated scripting amplifies these benefits. Scripts can be set to run on a specific schedule or added as automation to pre-built or custom monitors. Using monitors can ensure that scripts automatically act based on events or thresholds: resolving common alerts, restarting services, or collecting and storing important information. The result? Faster resolutions, fewer errors, and scalable automation that evolves with your environment.
10. Reporting
Manual reporting methods are slow, error-prone, and leave decision-makers guessing. Worse, by the time manual reports are compiled, the data might already be outdated, meaning there’s no opportunity to prevent issues or spot trends in time for meaningful intervention.
By onboarding an RMM platform for unified endpoint management, IT teams can experience real-time visibility into network performance and more through the use of dashboards that serve as a real-time single management pane. Data flows continuously from all managed endpoints and network devices, providing an immediate pulse on system health, patch compliance, issues, and possible vulnerabilities.
This goes beyond passive visibility, as much of the data surfaced can be accessed directly by expanding dashboard details. With a robust set of monitoring conditions and dashboard visibility, teams can act before minor issues escalate into major incidents. Automated reporting also includes shareable reports for tracking changes over time, generating exportable records for frameworks like HIPAA.
Finally, for IT managers, executive-level reporting translates technical insights into business-relevant metrics. Present figures like asset changes, patch compliance, and system information — all in a format that helps justify budgets, guide resource allocation, and showcase the tangible impact of IT operations.
Finding effective IT automation solutions
Not all IT automation tools are created equal. Basic solutions may offer surface-level features, but they often fall short when it comes to driving real operational efficiency. Modern IT challenges warrant a modern IT solution that combines key features like automated patch management, asset management, and remote monitoring and alerting from a single, unified platform.
ConnectWise RMM is the next-generation remote monitoring and management solution, designed to increase productivity and maximize ROI as your business needs evolve. Our award-winning RMM software is equipped with unmatched automation capabilities, including AI-assisted scripting and hundreds of pre-built intelligent monitors, all designed to help your IT team to work smarter, not harder.
Start your trial today to see firsthand how leveraging the power of IT automation can help take your IT support to the next level.
