Cloud is making automation an even more important tool for IT teams. One reason is that many businesses are opting for cloud to increase their agility. They’re largely doing that through implementing DevOps, which requires automation to streamline deployment procedures.
Another reason cloud requires automation is the rise of multi-cloud. As the number of cloud environments you manage increases, automation becomes an important tool for keeping environments in sync with regards to configurations, patches, user permissions, and other business and IT policies.
A final reason for using automation is to enable IT teams to do more, more easily. Cloud offers businesses the promise of reducing IT spending, IT staffing, or both, and so the remaining team is left to support a complex environment. Automation is the only way teams can keep up with both routine maintenance and work that expands the business’s capability.
Where to Use Automation
Automation can support almost any of your routine procedures. Look for opportunities to use automation in these areas:
Governance
Ensure policies that keep you in compliance with GDPR and industry-specific regulations are applied to all your instances.
Reduce spending
Cloud is pay-per-use, so it pays to use less. Schedule instances to shutdown every night and start up every morning to they only use resources when there are users in the office.
Keep configurations consistent
Ensure the same configuration is applied across all your environments. This helps you get the best performance and also reduces security risks.
Big data projects
Big data projects can require big technical efforts across a lot of resources. Automation makes it easier to complete the necessary work, ensuring operations like file transfers complete successfully.
Log analysis
As you implement more environments, the amount of data that needs to be reviewed increases. Automation can help you pull logs from all your environments together and run analytics that give you an overall picture of your status.
How to Implement Automation
Implementing automation requires addressing both people and technology issues. The technology issues are perhaps simpler. If you have a single cloud provider, you can use tools such as AWS Systems Manager Automation to handle common deployment and maintenance tasks.
If you have a multi-cloud environment, look for tools like Puppet, Chef, or Nutanix Calm that work with multiple cloud vendors. If you have a private or hybrid cloud, these tools will let you support your on-premises environment the same way you support your public cloud. Even if you have a single cloud environment, you may prefer to use a third-party product to avoid becoming even more dependent on your cloud provider.
Whichever automation tool you use, you’ll need to train your team to work with them. Using a third-party tool that works across environments mean you don’t need to your team to be experts in all the clouds in order to succeed with automation. It’s also helpful if you assign someone as your automation architect to ensure that automation becomes part of every cloud you implement.
Understand Your Clouds to Succeed With Automation
No matter the tools you select or how well you train your team, your automation project won’t succeed if it’s focused on small problems. Make sure you start by understanding the workflows your clouds support along with the information flows to understand where automation will provide the most return. That can guide you in choosing the right tools to support your automation efforts.
Want to learn more about how automation can benefit your multi-cloud environment? Contact dcVAST. We provide full support for all major cloud providers. Insight into their technology combined with an understanding of your workflows leads to automation solutions that simplify your cloud operations.
