No doubt! Cloud adoption is on continuous rise globally as every organization, irrespective of size and industry, started realizing the cloud potential.
In these lines, every organization is physically and functionally chalking out plans to harness the complete cloud potential.
Gartner predicts, by 2025, more than 80% of enterprises globally will have their entire IT infrastructure depending on Cloud Computing.
Automation is adding to the cloud adoption trend by showing ways to easily automate many manual and repetitive tasks associated with a cloud-based environment, thus saving cost, time and efforts.
Though automation works well with public and private cloud models, it finds high relevance in a hybrid cloud environment, making the hybrid cloud automation the popular trend of the present and for the future.
Automation in Cloud or Hybrid cloud automation emerged as a successful solution in tackling heavy workloads, alongside supporting the goals of continuous integration and continuous deployment.
Offering the desired business value and high Return of Investment (RoI), hybrid cloud automation is seen as an effective means to achieve the goal of self-service IT in a cloud environment by supporting the IT teams at different levels.
At the architectural level, Hybrid cloud computing makes the job easier for cloud architects by facilitating automated standards for managing and provisioning of application workloads.
This helps cloud architects to focus on common management activities, while also allowing the IT department to speed up the deployment and management of public and private clouds.
At the developer level, automation typically improves the effectiveness of hybrid cloud architecture, making it easier for developers in handling complex applications that need quick deployments.
By automating storage, network and compute deployments, hybrid cloud automation channelizes solutions in a repeatable manner contributing to the effective and easy management of complex software stacks.
At the management level, hybrid cloud automation provides administrators with the set of pre-defined instructions related to governance that can empower end-users to provision resources on demand.
It helps architects by ensuring the IT resource deployment process is strictly aligned to organizational compliance and all automated compliance policies run through built-in features by default. This can a matter of serious risk if run manually and human errors arise.
Effective management of configurations, IP Address Management (IPAM), Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB), and orchestration frameworks are among other crucial areas where hybrid cloud automation offers a business advantage.
Reusability and automated workflows make automation the strong demand of the day for most organizations, as this naturally cuts down costs, boosts deployment speeds and drives business agility.
Hybrid cloud automation enables automation of both pre and post provisioning workflows based on standard design patterns.
Pre-provisioning tasks primarily include approvals pertaining to budgets and security, determining user access rights and assessment of resources in terms of their compliance to organizational requirements.
While, post-provisioning tasks majorly cover cloud integration with user and asset-tracking directories, patching, security monitoring and penetration testing, tools and services, among others.
To derive the desired business value from hybrid cloud automation and automated hybrid cloud management, organizations need to focus on following aspects:
While above steps contribute to the hybrid cloud automation setup, do not forget to consider basic steps that prepare the ground for effective cloud automation.
These include ensuring complete visibility, using auto-scaling wherever required, developing a plan for cost monitoring and optimization, and creation of automated and repeatable pipelines.
Various research studies confirm that there is a drastic reduction in non-cloud workloads, owing to the rising cloud adoption.
A leading global survey states that 90 percent of enterprises globally prefer to have multiple cloud platforms in the years to come, with more than 50 percent of them looking at hybrid cloud option for enhanced control and security over data and applications.
Another study found that 32% of IT infrastructure and application workloads are already on hybrid cloud and this number is expected to rise with every passing year. By the end of this decade, the number is poised to grow to surprising 90%.
There is a growing interest for hosting new applications and related workloads on the hybrid cloud setup.
While there is a promising future for hybrid cloud, most organizations still doubt as ‘to what extent will that contribute to business value?’
Definitely to the desired extent, given the support of a robust hybrid cloud monitoring framework to ensure application efficiency and availability across multiple infrastructure environments.
And, you require automation support! Experts say automation is very crucial in driving the effectiveness of a hybrid cloud monitoring framework by way of accurate results, improved data collection and dynamic scaling of infrastructure.
Not just this, automation has answers for many questions around the hybrid cloud infrastructure, related to Return of Investment (RoI), cloud integration with existing processes, security and governance, cloud resource management avoiding legacy issues, and others.
An effective hybrid cloud environment backed by automation can also be a major business advantage to your digital transformation initiatives, in terms of driving the change that leads to quality in service delivery and innovation.
All you need is the perfect architecture and effective management that extends to different clouds and on-premise infrastructures, supporting the hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Thinking of a hybrid cloud automation for your organization? Get on to it and start realizing the business benefits that it offers in the form of cost savings, improved business scalability, business consistency and enhanced security posture, lowered costs, improved business resiliency and more!
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