The Importance of Cloud Automation and How to Get There

Source – solutionsreview.com

Automation is driving today’s enterprise technology advancements. Some forms of automation can be relatively easy to manage on your own, but for most situations, getting a tool or service is the right choice. With how fast technologies and processes are changing, automating repetitive tasks allows teams to learn new methods and practices. Automation frees up teams throughout the IT space to work on more pressing projects.

The importance of cloud automation is due to the increasingly agile IT culture. Whether its DevOps or some variation, enterprises are demanding more from their IT teams. This is also the case when it comes to outages. For example, the cost of network downtime is around $300,000 according to a market survey in 2016.

Tips for implementation

Start by finding the repetitive tasks you want to eliminate. IT teams spend way too much time on repetitive administrative work. Surprisingly, many IT teams spend over half of their resources on daily operations. This is an obscene use of time for any modern business. It is so easy to fall behind the competition when your team is forced to “keep the lights on” instead of dedicating their time to improving and innovating.

Eliminating these tasks is the most crucial part of automation, and it should be the first component that you focus on. Also, your team will gain experience with automation while developing new habits to improve collaboration. You can use this time to test exactly what works and doesn’t work for your specific team. It will also be first-hand evidence of how useful automating processes can be.

Automation Centric Solutions

There are many specific enterprise solutions that offer easily deployable automation. Network monitoring solutions provide enterprises with the knowledge they need regarding their network. The same goes for Kubernetes monitoring or cloud monitoring tools.

Making automation a key aspect of container security is crucial. You don’t want your containers to be reliant on manual security processes, this is inviting trouble. Tools like Kubernetes help manage container deployment security tasks, but enterprise teams often need an outside container security platform.

Managed services

Enterprises looking to add automated practices may not have the internal experience to do so. Many of the tools you may find will also be focused on a few key areas, but not everywhere. Cloud managed service providers give enterprises the expertise they need to create automation in just about anywhere you’re looking for.

AWS is considered an optimal cloud infrastructure for utilizing cloud automation. They pair well with enterprises looking to take advantage of this. However, it’s often the case that enterprises are unable to accomplish it on their own. Managed service providers can help enterprises with migration, hybrid cloud management, and much more. Automation is just one option many providers offer.

The future of automation

Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, recently spoke with SiliconANGLE and provided interesting insights into the direction of automation. What stood out most to me in this interview was that Olson recognizes the opportunity to automate decision.

Olson says, “In the ’90s and ’00s, the industry wrapped software around business processes. Over the next two decades, we’re going to wrap software around decisions, automating bets people are going to make.”

Human error is often the cause of any business, IT team, or even nation’s downfall. Look at Blockbuster, they almost bought failing Circuit City and they denied a $50million offer to buy Netflix. Those bets were failures. Perhaps automating bets would have taken care of this error.

This is obviously irrelevant to IT, but the point still stands. People will always make mistakes. Automated tools that can predict future outcomes is invaluable. Blockbuster would have recognized the numerous flaws in their business plans.

Technology making decisions for you might be far away, but there are tools that display its effectiveness. It’s like chaos-as-a-service being able to catch errors in the IT environment. It essentially predicts the future.