The 7 Secrets of IT Automation

Is your business falling behind in the race to the top?

Your business moves fast. Different, often-competing units within your enterprise want to achieve business priorities, drive efficiencies, and rapidly produce revenue. They’re relying on IT to provide the resources necessary to grow fast. They need what they need and they need it now—as in yesterday.

How can you ensure fast compliant delivery of resources—be it virtual machines (VMs), applications, public cloud resources, or other types—so your business can grow quickly without friction and delay?

The answer: IT automation.

Let’s walk through the seven secrets your organization can immediately use to start meeting the needs of digital transformation through IT automation.

Secret 1: Choose to Offer Self-Service IT As Your New Normal, Not the Rare Exception

Challenge:

The dream of self-service IT to help accelerate digital transformation no longer has to be a figment of your imagination. In the past, everyone involved in the IT automation and provisioning process needed to be an expert in scripting, and governance challenges could be a nightmare. Plus, being an expert in various hybrid cloud and multi-cloud technologies was as essential as knowing the business outcomes. A lack of hands-on knowledge of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Terraform was slowing down the pace of development. No more.

Solution:

Make self-service IT a central pillar of how your business operates. Implement user-friendly catalogs with easy-to-understand and implement blueprints so provisioning resources such as compute, storage, or backup is a snap. And your self-service IT framework should adhere to your governance and compliance standards so you never have to worry about costly mistakes. Commit to SS-IT and don’t look back.

Secret 2: Extensibility Matters – Across All Your Systems

Challenge:

Isn’t it terrible when stuff just doesn’t work? This applies not just to our everyday lives but can be especially infuriating when your enterprise technology hits its limits – most often in the form of a lack of extensibility. It can bring progress and productivity to a screeching halt. It doesn’t have to be this way. To get ahead, you need private data centers (vCenter, Hyper-V), public clouds, and/ or Infrastructure-as-Code platforms (like Terraform) to work together.

Solution:

Empower your users to leverage new and legacy technology whenever and however they need them by leveraging codeless integration. Promote an “adopt the best technology vs. best of suite” mindset. Successfully extending to multiple cloud providers in an organized fashion while trying to predict the future doesn’t have to be a painful task. Don’t make your developers wait for months just for integration of new technologies. Extensibility makes it happen.

Secret 3: Orchestrate or Continue to Complicate

Challenge:

For your journey to digital transformation, it’s critical to understand the importance of orchestration. Orchestration goes hand in hand with automation, however it offers a key distinction. It should liberate you and your end users from manual and cumbersome tasks. Admins can also coordinate functions, security, teams, compliance activities, and cloud services with orchestration.

Solution:

In short, orchestration is all about the automation of multiple tasks. These include optimizing coding to prevent error; coordination, arrangement and management for cloud services and systems; management of networks and connections to disparate systems, including those in different geographic regions, and others. Get orchestrating—you’ll be glad you did.

Secret 4: Automate, Provision and Manage Resources—Intelligently

Challenge:

Self-service IT, in and of itself, makes the lives of all technological stakeholders in your enterprise, much easier. Provisioning time can be cut from weeks to minutes. You’ll save on costs, and your users – from admins to DevOps and others – will get what they need and complete projects to meet business objectives. You may be asking: “That all sounds great, but what do I do about day-2 management?”

Solution:

Great question! Once your IT resources are provisioned, managing them can’t be overlooked. Get a plan to deploy and manage the complete service lifecycle for resources. Use platforms and set policies that discover and ingest brownfield resources. And, make sure the solution you choose is able to maintain compliance throughout.

Secret 5: Control Costs Without Compromising Capabilities

Challenge:

As hybrid cloud environments scale, manual cost tracking processes tend to fail fast and scripting can’t keep up when new services are added or when pricing changes (which is often). Did you know 39% of cloud engineers don’t take action to save cost, according to the 2021 State of FinOps report?

Solution:

You need to be able to understand what’s going on with your cloud spend, then visualize how to optimize that spend, and finally act on those optimization insights automatically. Make sure you implement systems and policies that give you the ability to see and compare costs among all of your cloud resources, both public and private. Plus, you need these systems to work in a true multi-cloud environment and not in a fragmented fashion, in a way that automates optimization. Leverage best of breed approaches to keep your cloud costs in check without compromising on the benefits of using cloud resources, paving the way for accelerated digital transformation in a financially-responsible manner.

Secret 6: Bring Order to Chaos with Governance

Challenge:

Controlling the chaos is a basic requirement for effective cloud management. That’s why governance is so important. Not knowing who’s accessing systems or overprovisioning resources can make you feel like you’re being robbed – or at the very least, uncomfortably exposed. Manual approval processes take a long time and often delays resource availability. You want to automate resource provisioning, but establishing and maintaining clear guardrails may seem like an impossible task. Breaking down these hurdles is as critical as identifying the right technology for your IT needs.

Solution:

Implementing good governance cannot be treated as a nice-to-have when it comes to digital transformation via cloud environments. Create a clear organizational hierarchy to see your systems and who’s using them. Trigger approvals and send alerts based on services criteria (development, testing, etc.). And, use role-based access control to ensure resources are used properly. Stop herding cats: start governing so you can keep innovating without worry – and maintain your sanity.

Secret 7: Stay Compliant and Stay Secure

Challenge:

While it is important to stay agile and focused on the outcomes, you should also focus on compliance. This is critical not just for organizations in healthcare, government or finance but also for enterprises in practically every vertical these days. You don’t want your company to be featured in news articles for all the wrong reasons.

Solution:

Adhere to compliance standards that are important for your company and industry. From basic compliance frameworks such as CIS, PCI-DSS all the way to NIST, HIPPA, etc., it’s important to stay proactive and utilize automation in compliance and security. Identifying exposed S3 buckets and IP addresses shouldn’t be difficult. Taking simple steps to prevent a breach now can save a lot of time and effort later recovering from one.

Stop worrying. Start transforming.

Now that you know the seven secrets to getting your digital transformation moving faster, you need a trusted to partner to help you succeed on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. That’s where CloudBolt comes in. Our solutions cover the gambit to help you wherever you are in your digital transformation—hybrid and multi-cloud management, codeless integrations, cloud cost optimization and security, or automation and self-service IT.

See how CloudBolt stacks up to the competition and delivers the most value for IT, end users and DevOps, and FinOps.

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