The local clinical microbiology laboratory's responsibilities range from characterizing the causative agent of a patient's infection to helping detect global disease outbreaks. These processes are becoming increasingly more complex. Every laboratory is obliged to continually improve quality while operating more efficiently. The clinical microbiology laboratory is being challenged to do more work, identify more microorganisms, report complex and changing drug-related information, automate procedures, integrate traditional lab data with molecular findings, and participate in public health reporting and outbreak detection. Informatics provides the tools and processes to satisfy most of these demands and also offers unique opportunities to advance the clinical microbiology laboratory, allowing the lab to do more with less. Therefore, it is important for microbiologists to be familiar with informatics (Table 1) (1). Although many informatics components are already widely used in clinical microbiology, there are many emerging tools that are not being used routinely but that could be leveraged by the laboratory. Studies have demonstrated that implementation of informatics tools can improve the efficiency, accuracy, precision, and rapidity of microbiology testing and reporting (2,–7). In this review, we describe the broad impact of informatics on clinical microbiology and highlight burgeoning areas of clinical microbiology informatics, such as its role in total laboratory automation (TLA), telemicrobiology, and microbial whole-genome sequencing (WGS).