Cheat Your Way to IT Success With Zero-Touch Automation

This post is an adapted excerpt from our new ebook of the same name, Cheat Your Way to IT Success With Zero-Touch Automation. To download the full ebook, click here.

Technology has evolved rapidly over the last few decades, yet some of the world’s top IT executives admit that they relied on brute force tactics to solve critical business problems. Today, a growing number of experts agree that automation is the future of IT—and that a zero-touch mindset is the future of the future of IT (see what we did there?). 

IT is under an incredible amount of pressure to spend more time on strategic initiatives and less time on repetitive manual tasks. The problem? They’ve been asked to do so with limited resources or headcount. In some cases, IT leaders are facing both of these obstacles.

If you’ve just begun your zero-touch IT journey, some of the workflows and strategies you’ve seen in previous ebooks might have felt like cheat codes for a video game. In many ways, they are cheat codes. Here are a few additional ways IT can work smarter, not harder to enable the business to achieve its loftiest goals.

Configuring your zero-touch “gaming controller”

In its simplest definition, zero-touch IT is a concept where automated workflows are created such that IT doesn’t have to take any additional action beyond the workflow. But when it comes to automating the onboarding and of offboarding employees, zero touch doesn’t mean zero work. Even after IT has done the work to build powerful and secure workflows, someone in HR needs to kick them off. 

As you’ll see in the image below, this onboarding workflow runs whenever HR submits a ticket via Jira or a Google Form.

After someone in HR submits the ticket, a few things occur:

• The data is automatically sent via a JSON payload to a Custom Trigger in BetterCloud
• The Custom Trigger automatically kicks off the BetterCloud onboarding workflow, which then handles account creation, user provisioning, and advanced configurations across your SaaS environment
• All of this happens without IT needing to “touch” anything.

This is the framework to enable IT to beat the boss-level ULM beast. Let’s take a look at how you can apply a cheat code to this workflow to give it a boost. 

Use triggers to initiate your BetterCloud workflows

Imagine that one of your marketing team members has transferred to your sales engineering department. In the screenshots below, you’ll see that you can trigger a marketing offboarding workflow and a sales engineering onboarding workflow just by changing the employee’s Org Unit in Google Workspace. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s happening in these workflows:

• Removing a user from the Marketing Org Unit triggers the marketing offboarding workflow, which removes that person from marketing-specific Slack channels and revokes access to applications like Asana
• When IT adds that person to the Solution Engineering Org Unit, BetterCloud runs the solution engineering onboarding workflow, which grants access to relevant groups, Slack channels, and additional apps they need to do their job

That’s a lot of work—and it’s important to remember that the workflow kicks off when IT moves a user into a specific Org Unit. Pretty neat, right?

The beginning of the end of your zero-touch journey, kind of

Is this the only “cheat code” that you need to jumpstart your zero-touch IT journey? Of course not. You’ll likely need to think critically about which applications your employees use most, and more importantly, how you can automate important (but tedious) tasks that prevent users from, well, using those tools. 

But good news! Our new ebook gives you the head start you need. We’ll show you how automation can increase your IT team’s efficiency and maximize your investment in the top SaaS applications. We’ll also unlock “cheat codes” that will jumpstart your zero-touch IT journey. 

Want to dive in? Grab your copy here. Curious how a SaaS management platform like BetterCloud can be the catalyst for your zero-touch journey? Schedule a demo.