When to Automate Recurring Events

“Is it worth it?” is probably the most common question customers ask business architects and value advisors. Whether it’s a software deployment or process improvement, customers want to be assured that the effort and risk of a project delivers real value. That is the question people in my line of work spend their days trying to answer. In many cases, the answer is complicated and requires a great deal of experience to explain. On the other hand, there are instances where it doesn’t take a lot of time and expertise to determine the value of a project, like automating manual processes.  

Any recurring task that involves technology queries, actions, approvals or updates can be automated. Some common examples are:

• Phishing response playbooks 
• Excessive account lockout detection and remediation
• Firewall port access requests
• Unexpected configuration change identification and remediation. 

Splunk has a public repository of automations for our Security Orchestration and Automation Response (SOAR) tool, showing many examples. The only limit is your imagination.

Going Beyond the Financials: Automation Benefits for Your Agency

In my work with public sector customers across the country, a common theme I hear is the difficulty of recruiting and retaining highly skilled IT and cybersecurity professionals. This can be due to several factors: competition from commercial companies who generally pay more; a worldwide shortage of people to fill these roles; and outdated and legacy systems commonly associated with government agencies that aren’t attractive to young professionals.

In general, people who go into the public sector do so because they want to make a difference and support the mission of the agency they work for. Too often in the IT and cyber realms, much of the daily work is drudgery — repeating the same tasks over and over again. This is not a formula for success in employee retention. But, if we can automate those recurring tasks and remove the rote repetition, the immediate benefit is more fulfilled workers, and that generally means longer retention and better recruitment. Our most successful and stable public sector customers use automation to free up their people’s time to do tasks that impact the agency's mission, supporting their personal career goals and resulting in longer tenures.

Another major benefit of automation is to reduce human error in repetitive tasks. When people are working fast to complete something they do over and over again, it’s very easy to potentially mis-key or vary the way you resolve the issue, thinking you’ve addressed the problem when you haven’t. For routine tasks, the typical human error rate is 1%. That may not seem like a lot, but it can be devastating in IT and cybersecurity where a single misconfiguration or error can lead to an outage or open up a security vulnerability. Automation takes care of the things humans either don’t do well or don’t want to do, freeing them up to think, strategize and plan, which also allows them to meet their individual professional goals and have a productive and fulfilling career.

Calculating the Financial Advantages of Automation

Now, back to the math. Anyone with basic math skills and a few pieces of data can do the net benefit or return on investment (ROI) calculations of automating. Just like there are citizen data scientists, this is a case where everyone can be a citizen value advisor. Woo hoo!

I was inspired to write this blog when I spotted the table below on my social media feed. It’s a great visual that identifies the sweet spots for finding the right targets for automation. On the vertical access is the time the task takes to complete, otherwise known as the amount of time you can save. On the horizontal axis is how often the task is performed. 

As you review the results of the intersection of those axes, an interesting pattern emerges. The sweet spot for automation saving time is tasks that take at least five minutes and recur daily. More frequent events and complicated tasks are more likely to be worth the trouble of automating, seeing that automating a task that takes one hour to accomplish and is done five times a day could save 10 months of effort annually. 

If you take this as a basis for your quick and dirty calculations, the next steps would look like this:

The math is pretty straightforward. How many times a day X how long it takes X number of people doing it X how much do those people cost = Direct benefit. For that task that happens five times a day and takes one hour, the only other important factor here is how many people are doing it each day.

Times a day  X  how long it takes  X # of people doing it  X  how much they cost = Daily Direct benefit

5 times          X    60 minutes            X       3 people              X  $70 per hour labor rate  =    $1,050 

To calculate the annual benefit you need one more data point. Does this occur every calendar day or only on work days?  The annual direct benefit is either:

365 x $1,050 = $382,250 or 

240 x $1,050 = $252,000

So now we know the annual benefit of automating this task. But of course that is only one side of the equation. The other consideration is what it will cost to create and maintain the automation.

Typically, for a more complex automation, it would take two weeks to develop and test and at least one additional week to make updates throughout the year. That’s 120 hours  X  $70 hourly labor rate = $8,400 in annual development costs.

If you are planning 10 automations and the software costs $100,000 then the software cost applied to each automation would be  $100,000 / 10 = $10,000 per automation. Our software cost for this automation would be $10,000.

Now we can answer the question: Is it worth it?

$382,500    -       $18,400       =    $365,100  for every calendar day

$252,000    -       $18,400       =    $233,600  for work days

In this case, the answer is a resounding YES.

Feel free to use this quick and dirty calculation to determine if a recurring task is worth automating in your environment. If you don’t want to do the math yourself, Splunk has a global team of business value advisors who would be happy to help you evaluate potential automation targets.  

Please contact your Splunk sales manager to connect you with your assigned value advisor.