Cloud operations automation: Three things to focus on
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Highlights
- With the ever-growing footprint of cloud, enterprises look for reduction in operational overheads by optimizing machine-human collaboration and smart cloud operations.
- Automation is one of the foundational elements of any cloud journey. It reduces human intervention and boosts efficiency in cloud operations.
- TCS’ Machine First Delivery Model (MFDM™) simplifies cloud operations effectively with a broad set of controls to provide hands-free maintenance and higher security posture.
In this article
Why automate cloud operations
Automated cloud operations for faster and better business outcomes.
With organizations pursuing digital transformation and cloud-first strategies, organizations must also look at adopting automation for their cloud operations. Automation helps eliminate challenges faced in manual processes such as repetition, inefficiency, and errors in cloud operations.
Typical operational tasks such as resource provisioning, configuration management, software deployment, resource tagging, security controls, logging, and monitoring functions are some of the top use cases for cloud operations automation. While automation plays an important role in managing workloads in the cloud, orchestration addresses the process of sequencing and codifying those automated tasks to occur at specific times for specific purposes.
Value from automation
By 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured infrastructure automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency.
That’s according to Gartner. Many have already embarked on the transformation journey, making the most of cloud-native automation and orchestration solutions that help them:
Build a secure and scalable cloud environment as compared to manual operations.
Free the cloud operations teams from repetitive and manual administrative tasks.
Reduce errors with the deployment of more predictable and reliable workflows.
Enable IT teams to focus on higher-level work to address business needs, such as integrating cloud services or developing new features.
Overcoming automation challenges
Mantra for effective cloud operations automation
While the benefits of cloud automation are clear, many still struggle with their automation initiatives. Here are three best practices you can follow to get the maximum value from your cloud operations automation:
- Identify the right use cases to automate: There’s huge potential for automation in cloud operations. Whether it is discovering, organizing and auto-provisioning cloud resources, or performing data backup at regular intervals, security vulnerability scans, and ongoing data replication for disaster recovery (DR), the opportunities are many. However, companies need to identify the use cases that will be critical for meeting their business goals.
- Use automation to remove redundant instances: As part of the workload life cycle management on cloud, automation can be leveraged to remove obsolete instances. Typically, multiple workloads run on cloud some as long-term entities, and some like scaled containers for a short time. Automation helps remove idle or no longer used resources along with their configuration items.
- Define business-specific workflows to automate cloud operations: For example, manufacturing domain-related business cases where on-demand analytics need to be run on the data captured at the shop floor. In this case, cloud automation templates could be leveraged to create a certain number of containers for a microservices application, which automates the loading of software components into container clusters. It connects storage and database, configures a virtual network, creates load balancers for the clusters, and enables the workload to run analytics.
Phased approach
Prioritizing core operations functions to automate is the first step.
Business applications rely on a number of microservices and containerization environments, making cloud operations necessary to run these applications efficiently in such a complex environment. It is also critical to implement the right processes and tools to enable automation, to reduce or eliminate manual efforts, to provision and manage cloud-based workloads and services. Setting up efficient cloud operations involves readiness from people, process and tools perspectives with automation and integration aspects.
Automation plays an important role in cloud operations and companies can take a phased approach to it. They can start by carefully prioritizing the core operations functions, such as provisioning and configuration management; event and incident management; availability and continuity management; and security and compliance management to automate their cloud operations and run it efficiently. With automation, companies are also embarking on proactive and predictive cloud operations powered by artificial intelligence.
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