Have you seen 1993 classic ‘Sleepless in Seattle’? This movie is heart-warming story of a mourning widower named Sam Baldwin (Hanks) whose eight-year-old son Jonah feels that his father really needs to find new love. In a very unconventional way Jonah finds Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) who eventually becomes that one true love Sam was looking for.
When I think about cloud and automation, this story fits right in. Automation has been there for years in various shapes and forms. However, when cloud came into play automation became more relevant.
If you are in cloud or planning to move to cloud, I am sure you have your business case ready for the same. Increased efficiency, better agility and better collaboration are few of key benefits we all know cloud offers. The core aspect of cloud platforms is that they offer uniform provisioning capability as services. This capability of cloud makes inherently ready for automation.
The combination of agility and efficiency makes a far better business case for cloud. If you think about digital native players, you will suddenly realize that managing large platforms with smaller technology team makes them profitable. Automation has lot to contribute to that. Let’s explore how your businesses can benefit from bringing automation and cloud together.
While I am talking about four different ways of leveraging automation for cloud, please note that a complete ecosystem of automation covering all of these will deliver the right ROI(return on investment) for your organization if you are ready for cloud.
Automation of workload
Workload move to cloud does mandate a lot of effort, and the decision of whether to move it (and how) is ultimately about return on investment. Many workloads simply don’t meet this test — the effort to move them exceeds the operational savings.
Those workloads that are easy to get converted to microservices and packaged in a container are the ones who meet ROI test. These workloads are always worth automating.
Automation of application delivery
If you are on cloud and you have not thought about automating the build-test-deploy workflow for the application, then you are still far from real benefits of cloud. This is done via continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools.
Continuous integration (CI) involves the automated building and testing of every code commit. Continuous delivery (CD) automates the creation of deployable components.
Automation for your DevOps team’s agility
Together with workload automation and application delivery automation you can make your DevOps team’s life much easier. The team start focusing real critical aspects of architecture instead of bothering about infrastructure and application delivery on day today basis. The applications or solutions deliver become more reliable, safe, fast, secure and compliant.
Automation for your business processes
Once your IT team is taken care it is time to take care of business. While IT can do a lot of smart integrations, sometimes it make sense to leave the boring tasks of manual review, validation and consolidation to process automation tool. Creating layer of business process automation will add the cheery on top of your cake. Now yours applications can serve the various business needs seamlessly whether or not they are technically compatible to each other. Consider RPA tools to address difficult or expensive integrations that is not worth investing on.
In conclusion, automation will give you the agility you are looking for your business and your customer. Start automation inside IT and scale from there on to every corner of your organization.
