It is 2021 and automation is the need of the hour for businesses and individuals alike. Businesses ranging from small-sized to multinational conglomerates have taken notice of the power of automation.
The power of automation brings a degree of mobility, transparency, and efficiency that was unheard of before. The metric that puts automated solutions ahead of the curve is the ability to adapt. Automation is not bounded to departments or sectors in a business.
Automation transcends all the traditional boundaries in business operations. It can be used in the installation stages, in the various levels of integration, and during the maintenance phase. Some of the newer technologies have also been able to automate the sales and marketing fields.
Automation in itself has a host of different technologies that are sometimes applied individually or merged with one another to attain the required level of automation. These technologies include Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Telemetry and Communications, wireless applications, and many more.
Automation is still at its initial stages, there is progress being made every day but a lot of the masses are still not clear about the fundamentals of automation and how to implement these solutions into a business objective.
Let’s look at some of the tasks that can be automated to increase efficiency and effectiveness:
Table of Contents
Monitor FTP and SFTP for updated or new files:
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and SFTP (Secure File Protocol) are the standard procedure for the transfer or management of files between the website server and the local system. For big corporations, there are usually stacks and stacks of data and files are stored in the servers.
Keeping track of all the changes being made to the folders and files is a time-consuming and tiresome task. New files and folders are being added to the server every minute in a corporation.
Combining all of this, the maintenance of the server along with all its content is not an easy task but there are tools such as Automation Workshop available now that can be enabled to automate the entire process through constant monitoring of folders in the server and automatic synchronization of changes without any coding knowledge. Added to that, there are Advanced Schedulers that can execute jobs automatically on a schedule.
Automate E-Mail:
Automation can also mechanize the entire process of sending, receiving, and managing emails. There are state-of-the-art automated email technologies that are not only secured using SSL and STARTTLS but also can distribute the emails that need wide distribution smoothly.
For a multinational corporation, inter-company email chains are a huge pain point. With an automated email system, the stress of sending these emails reduces drastically. Similarly, for any business starting out, be it to B2C or B2B, sending promotional emails to prospective emails to emails to clients takes a lot of time. This can be remedied using automation.
Zip and Unzip files:
One of the most essential benefits that automation brings to the table is the automatic compressing and extracting of files on the go. In a big corporation, there are files and folders that they take up a lot of space on the servers, having an automation solution that can compress solution into zip files effectively goes a long way to save up space in the servers and also make file transfer much smoother.
These solutions are not limited to only one format; they handle all kinds of files and formats based on different operating systems.
These are just some of the functions that implementing an automation solution can bring to the table. Tools like these are used for files and folders within the server but there are other tools such as Selenium that allow the user to create web-based testing suites for applications.
Nowadays, it doesn’t matter what kind of business it is, it has been unanimously decided that the way forward is automation. Implementing automation technologies strategically will reap the benefits for any corporation for years to come.
Successfully implementing automation is no easy feat, it requires a lot of planning and a clear idea of the technologies available in the market. A simple list of tutorials is available here.
