Today, customers demand quick and hassle-free solutions that are efficient in both performance and security. For that, businesses should adopt technology, which can help them deliver such resilient performance quickly. And that technology refers to cloud computing, which lets multiple users work on the same file parallelly and remotely.
Cloud computing solutions offer many benefits, and automation is one of them. Many cloud service providers make on-demand resource accessing possible and even easier but do not provide a solution to manage them in a package. You can also imagine how difficult it is to configure and manage various VMs, clusters, and virtual networks with all-time availability and consistent performance alongside other operations. That is where automation comes to the rescue.
What is Cloud Automation?
Cloud automation is a process that minimizes users’ manual infrastructure management activities by simplifying all cloud operations. In simple words, it is a line of code that manages cloud infrastructural activities, such as scaling, provisioning, and many others automatically as configured. In other words, Cloud automation is a set of tools and processes that minimizes the team’s efforts and time in managing cloud workloads.
The main benefit of automating cloud configuration is to eliminate various manual and repetitive processes of cloud workloads, such as development, deployment, and management. The reason is that manually these procedures are very error-prone and demand lots of troubleshooting efforts and time, which questions the availability of workloads and efficiency of employees’ productivity. Plus, manual cloud procedures may lead to application security vulnerabilities, which ultimately puts your organization at the target of hackers. On the other hand, automation reduces the complexities of cloud infrastructure.
In case you want to achieve a DevOps capability for your infrastructure, then the platform must be refactored with IaC (Infrastructure as Code) model that contains closed feedback loops and CI/CD pipeline structures. This methodology needs automation support to work effectively, or we can say more than a mandatory requirement.
So, the main question arises, how would cloud teams achieve this cloud automation? And the answer is by using cloud automation and orchestration running over the virtualized platform.
Before we list the benefits of cloud automation, let’s first understand the difference between cloud automation and orchestration.
Cloud Automation Vs. Cloud Orchestration:
When designing a resilient cloud strategy, both cloud automation and orchestration turn out to be the most helpful procedures. However, due to some processes, many people make the mistake of considering them alike, but they aren’t. Therefore, it is important to know how they differ from each other along with their core purposes.
Cloud Automation:
It is all about aligning automated cloud management tools with the cloud platforms to perform all mundane tasks and complete them without any human intervention. These types of procedures include regular data backups, servers provisioning, or detecting and eliminating ideal processes.
Cloud Orchestration:
On the other hand, cloud orchestration is a process of configuring or organizing tasks for automation, which is more like coordinating them to achieve the ultimate cloud infrastructure goals. The main idea behind this procedure is to gather up low-level tasks to create new processes and coordinate them across the infrastructure of multiple systems or locations.
The difference:
While cloud automation is responsible for keeping tasks, such as deployment and management, ready to be automated, cloud orchestration coordinates with such tasks and makes them follow a strategic approach to get closer to the predefined goals. Finally, we can say that it is possible to achieve automation without orchestration, while used together, they can bring rewarding results.
Benefits of Cloud Automation:
Reducing IT Infrastructure Expenses:
As this automation reduces users’ manual efforts and saves them lots of time, it directly results in escalated process and sometimes may carry them flawlessly. In short, we can say that the involvement of fewer manual processes, the fewer errors and vulnerabilities, and less time investment in troubleshooting processes. This extra time can be invested in exploring innovations.
Enforcing Continuous Deployment:
Continuous deployment often stands for automation of the continuous integration and deployment pipeline procedures to help them roll out new features and updates even more frequently. The developers’ team associated with the DevOps best practices may reap maximum benefits from this procedure by aligning automation tools to keep applications ready for the cloud deployment.
Benefiting from The Cloud:
Cloud automation tools are specifically designed to make the most out of the cloud infrastructure, which covers benefits, such as:
- Automated backups
- Effective security and compliance management
- Eases up configuration changes procedures
- Deploys the code automatically on the cloud platforms or through just a single glass of pen
Leveraging Better Security and Resilience:
Automating sensitive and error-prone tasks is often considered an intelligent move as it demands a few, required people to access the mission-critical systems. Plus, it is the best way to reduce possibilities of human-made errors and system account redistribution. If you design the security best practices into these automated procedures, it would be better to enhance the security standards of the application and often considered a path to enforce security measures into the development and deployment process.
Achieving Proactive Backup Processes:
For any organization or individual, having an automatic backup procedure is critical, especially when protecting systems from uncertain cyberattacks or component failures and restoring data in the post disruption cases. This automated backup helps a lot in enhancing cloud infrastructure’s resilience as it automatically backs up the data from the on-premises system to the cloud environments and creates their replicas in the distinct/remote locations if subscribed for such.
Achieving Next-Level Cloud Process Governance:
While systems are configured manually, there might be some possibilities of getting low visibility over the currently running programs. Therefore, the main question is, how can they achieve complete control over the cloud infrastructure without even having centralized visibility or governance? That’s where cloud automation comes to the rescue, which configures resources in a more standardized way and gives you complete control over your organization’s IT infrastructure.
Final Words:
In conclusion, we can say that cloud automation is the ultimate way to reap the benefits of cloud environments. While manual cloud management tasks consume lots of time and resources, cloud automation does the same faster and tries to address the maximum number of business challenges. Cloud automation is a way to achieve IT infrastructural innovation and enhance business productivity.
If your organization is still not empowered with cloud automation, it is time to employ it in your IT infrastructure and grab a chance to get your company listed in one of the most competitive and leading companies. Contact us now to book your initial cloud consultation with one of the leading cloud computing services providers in India.