Cloud Automation and Orchestration Made Easy

Source – news.sys-con.com

Step into any boardroom and the talk is all about speed and quality: How to accelerate the delivery of innovative new products and services, while improving the quality of existing ones. When this question is asked, all eyes turn to the CIO: How can IT bring business velocity to both the software lifecycle and the digital business, end-to-end from digital touchpoint to system of record?

This is especially the case for cloud-based services. Today’s modern enterprise environments are no longer strictly on-premises, as most companies are now leveraging the cloud as well-whether it’s a public healthcare provider remotely monitoring patient health, a bank delivering financial transactions in the cloud or an everyday retailer marketing its services in the cloud. The challenge is leveling the playing field across such diverse environments.

So when the question is asked about increasing the speed of services delivery, that question increasingly applies to cloud-based applications. But cloud computing orchestration is complex; manually deploying cloud-based or hybrid infrastructures, including server and storage clusters, virtual networks as well as the applications themselves, can place a massive additional load on your already hard-pressed IT team. Plus they need to monitor and manage the health of the entire system.

All of this complexity slows down the software delivery lifecycle and causing delays to urgent business critical processes.

Automating the Delivery of Cloud IT Services

Here’s the answer: Cloud automation. By automating the delivery of cloud IT services, organizations ensure that all requests regarding deployment and allocation of resources are fulfilled quickly and efficiently-including complex hybrid cloud scenarios. With cloud automation for example, the setup of an entire fleet of uniform virtual machines can be done in just a few simple steps, as opposed to setting up each one individually. And the principles are the same whether the stack is being provisioned on private, public or hybrid infrastructure.

So how does cloud automation actually work? The process is conducted through the use of virtual machine templates, while the automation platform does the bulk of the setup and deployment. The operator simply has to select a few options and check some boxes and then wait for the automated processes to complete. In just a few unattended steps, users get the resources they need and most importantly the business benefits from the faster delivery of innovative IT services.

With cloud automation, users take advantage of a self-service catalog to request and manage a wide range of multi-vendor, multi-cloud applications, infrastructure and custom services. Policy-based governance assures that users receive the right size resources for the task that needs to be performed across the service life cycle.

Today, enterprises run one of everything: They need pervasive automation, which is uniform across on-premises, cloud and hybrid. Cloud automation tools make provisioning for the cloud as easy as provisioning an on-premises infrastructure.