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Special Issue--IT Automation: Best Practices: Page 8 of 14

Some vendors focus on functions that apply to these individual areas:

1. Provisioning and base installation: These are not necessarily challenging tasks, but they are tedious. Depending upon the range of choices in an IT automation tool, there are several different ways of provisioning. Some are based on prebuilt models, some are hard-coded by your staff and others use an existing server as a template.

2. Patching and applying software updates: Performing this kind of maintenance to operating systems and network devices is another tedious IT task. In addition, in this era of zero-day exploits, patch management has turned into much more work--and more important work--than any of us anticipated.

3. Discovering and maintaining an up-to-date, accurate inventory of assets: This function, in turn, helps with license and maintenance fee management.

4. Job scheduling: While this was one of the earliest tasks to be automated, it continues to be an issue. These days this function extends to desktops and other devices beyond the traditional scope of scheduling of batch jobs on servers (or mainframes).