Automation is a powerful tool. With some foresight and a little elbow grease, you can save hours, days, or even months of work by strategically automating repetitive tasks. What makes automation particularly beneficial is that it eliminates manual interaction with multiple systems. Rather than manually uploading data to an event response system or notifying key support personnel of an incident, tying these tasks together through automation can reduce critical time and help resolve problems faster and more efficiently. But, before we can fill in the gaps between all of the platforms we are responsible for, we first need to understand how data moves around on the web and how we can use that process to our advantage.