The benefit of Hybrid Cloud automation and orchestration is a streamlined and organised single entity that allows business units to work and interact seamlessly across their infrastructure. Our customers see productivity, morale and returns boosted when they use automation to regain control of siloed IT systems.
We often deploy features we’ve built for our own infrastructure across our customers’ environments. The benefit of this is that we know they work – we’ve tested them across our daily operations. Here are some real-world examples of tasks we automate to make our customers’ operations more efficient and profitable.
Tasks we Automate to Make Hybrid Cloud More Efficient
Migration
Often, customers reach out initially for assistance migrating from an on-premises environment to a cloud-based one. Without automation, every app, server and byte of data within their infrastructure would need to be manually extracted and deployed across their new environment. This could take large businesses many years to complete, by which time, the features may be obsolete.
Hybrid Cloud automation allows us to automate deployment and shift almost all the relevant code to the new environment rapidly.
Security Hardening and Patching
Security teams that do not use automation must patch every vulnerability or bug manually. If an organisation relies on 3000 apps, each patch takes 30 minutes and each employee makes a minimum of 5 mistakes per day, that’s a lot of resources spent on manual labour.
Automating patching and hardening reduces time spent on menial tasks, freeing employees for innovation and growth. It also minimises mistakes, thereby reducing the organisation’s vulnerability to attack.
Configuration and Resource Management
Another task that’s considerably more accurate when automated is configuration management, particularly the configuration of Software as a Service products. Automation instantly ensures consistency and accuracy across all facets of your IT infrastructure by removing the chance of human error.
Automating configuration management allows organisations to scale without the need for additional resources.
Provisioning
Automating provisioning for our customers saves them time and boosts profitability. Tasks include reactivating firewalls that are turned off for any reason, granting end-users access to system programmes and deploying new features in a cloud-based environment.
Many of our customers also continue to see these benefits with the automation of ongoing system management.
Deployment
App deployment without automation is menial and time-consuming. Installing and configuring every app across a vast Hybrid Cloud infrastructure may require dedicated teams.
Once deployment automation is configured, it can be rolled out across all components of your environment. Then, previously ongoing, tedious tasks are completed in minutes.
Testing
We often roll out features we use ourselves to customers. The benefit of this is that the system or process being deployed has been thoroughly tested in a genuine live environment. Additionally, we automate testing for newly built configurations, so our customers save time and money with fast, accurate assurances.
This applies to validation, compliance and security testing.
Incident Response
Incident response is one of the most beneficial IT tasks that can be automated. Without automation, organisations need dedicated security teams working around the clock, and there is substantial room for error and delay.
Automating incident response allows organisations to mitigate data breaches and other security incidents before they spiral out of control.
Customer Challenges to Automation
The key reason our customers cannot achieve this level of automation themselves is a lack of resources.
Firstly, teams simply do not have the capacity to take on projects as complicated and time-consuming as automation. Although the goal of automation is to save time and money, the initial investment is large in terms of cost, time and overhead.
Secondly, there is a skills gap among Australian IT talent. It’s difficult to find enough people that are fluent in Ansible, cloud or infrastructure (for example) to sit on every IT team across Australia. It is also very rare for one person to have all these skills, so numerous experts would need to be procured to form a comprehensive team.
Lastly, customers struggle to automate and orchestrate their Hybrid Cloud infrastructure because of an inability to secure funding. Stakeholders notoriously do not understand the benefit of investing in cloud automation, unless specifically demonstrated with ROI calculations.
The Benefit of Partnering with Advent One
Partnering with a Hybrid Cloud automation and orchestration expert such as Advent One gives customers access to the resources preventing them from fully adopting a seamless cloud environment themselves. With the option of consulting or managed services, Advent One meets IT teams where they are, to drive maximum cloud efficiency.
Our team is made up of a range of subject matter experts, which allows us to optimise whatever systems and applications you have in place. We primarily use Red Hat Ansible, but we maintain flexibility which allows us to optimise for what our customers already have.
To find out how Advent One and Ansible can use automation to reduce your cloud spend, book a live demo with the experts.