In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the shift towards a cloud-first strategy is undeniable. Organizations across the globe recognize the power of the cloud, but merely migrating to the cloud is just the tip of the iceberg. The next significant stride in this digital transformation journey is to automate cloud operations, and here’s why: 

Imperative to automate cloud operations 

Organizations embracing the cloud need to confront the inherent challenges of manual processes – repetition, inefficiency, and errors. Consider everyday tasks like resource provisioning, configuration management, software deployment, security controls, and more. Automation is the elixir to these operational woes, offering a structured, streamlined approach. 

Further, with orchestration, organizations can sequence and codify these tasks, ensuring they occur at precise moments for specific goals, thereby maximizing efficiency. 

Potential of automation  

Gartner forecasts that by 2025, a whopping 70% of organizations will have integrated structured infrastructure automation, heralding flexibility and efficiency in operations. Those who have already embarked on this voyage harness several benefits: 

  • Security & Scalability: Automation fortifies and expands cloud environments beyond the capabilities of manual operations. 
  • Operational efficiency: Repetitive, mundane tasks? Automated operations liberate teams, allowing them to pivot towards value-added activities. 
  • Reliability: Predictable and trustworthy workflows mean fewer errors and better overall service delivery. 
  • Business-centric IT: With automation, IT teams can shift their focus to higher-value tasks, such as integrating cloud services or pioneering new features. 

 

Three insights to completely automate cloud operations 

Understanding the benefits of cloud automation is never new but most organizations halt when it comes to automating cloud operations. Consider these three best practices to automate cloud operations and gain maximum business value: 

  1. Identifying the right use cases: There’s underlying potential for automation in cloud operations – be it discovering, organizing, and provisioning cloud services, scheduling data backups, scanning for security vulnerabilities, or data replication for disaster recovery – the opportunities are many. However, based on the business operating procedures, the companies need to identify automation scenarios and implement accordingly, fulfilling business objectives. 
  2. Using automation to overcome redundancies: As part of workload lifecycle management on cloud, automation can be done to remove obsolete instances. Mostly, multiple workloads run on cloud – a few as long-term entities and a few like scaled containers. Automating these entities helps in removing idle or unused resources along with their respective configuration items. 
  3. Developing business-specific workflows: Based on the demand of business requirements, develop a set of workflows that create a specific number of containers for a microservices application. This will automate loading of software components into container clusters. The automation in cloud workflows establishes connection between storage and database, configures virtual networks, creates load balancers, and enables the workload to run analytics. 

Taking a phased, strategic approach  

The cloud ecosystem, with its intricate web of microservices and containerization, demands a structured approach to automation. This involves: 

  • Strategizing: Begin by identifying core operations functions. This could range from provisioning and configuration management to security and compliance management. 
  • Integrating: Adopting the right processes and tools is pivotal to successful automation, ensuring seamless provisioning and management of cloud-based services. 
  • Evolving: With foundational automation in place, companies can transition to proactive and AI-powered predictive cloud operations. 

Automation is not a mere technological addition; it’s a paradigm shift. As the digital transformation wave continues to crest, cloud automation will be the linchpin for businesses aspiring for agility, efficiency, and innovation. The future belongs to those who recognize and act on this potential today.