What is cloud automation?

The cloud is now an unavoidable part of our everyday life, impacting all industries and almost all businesses. The fast-growing popularity of technology prompts enterprises to look forward to leveraging the cloud and gaining a lead in the volatile market. Automated cloud was the original concept of the technology, offering on-demand services with the ability to scale dynamically and satisfy evolving demands. Though cloud automation is a reality today, it requires a complex approach involving ample expertise, special tools, and effort. Cloud automation is critical to the success of any business, giving them agility, scalability, and resilience. Organizations can streamline their operations and become cost-effective. Let’s dig deeper into cloud automation.

What is cloud automation?

Cloud automation is the practice or discipline of using specialized software tools and methodologies to simplify operations, reduce manual cloud infrastructure engineering, and automate some or the entire manual tasks regarding cloud management. Simply put, it’s the use of code or software to control the cloud infrastructure.

Previously, cloud infrastructure management was tedious and costly, requiring a hefty workforce to monitor CPU utilization, secure data, perform live backups, and others. Organizations configure cloud automation tools to control the installation, configuration, and cloud services management for enterprises to utilize their cloud resources efficiently.

Why use cloud automation?

Cloud automation plays a critical role in the functioning of future-ready enterprises. The lower cloud migration cost makes it an attractive choice for enterprises. Incorporating cloud automation cuts down the operation cost further while increasing productivity and lowering error rates. Here is why enterprises must opt for cloud automation.

Agility and business scalability

In this fast-shifting market landscape, a business must learn to adapt constantly in the shortest duration. Organizations must prepare to scale on demand and expect networks or application configurations to perform in daunting situations. When there is a surging demand or a critical failure, enterprises must respond with the ability to scale up or down. With a constantly changing infrastructure, a business requires more bandwidth, processing power, and storage facilities to tackle peak times and formidable situations. A dynamic approach that doesn’t put the company in trouble is optimal. Cloud automation and orchestration give the enterprise the much-needed agility and scalability to tackle the issues and stay competitive.

Simplify business processes

Enterprises might find cloud operations and monitoring a bit daunting, especially when adopting them. The cloud’s heterogeneous IT infrastructure might cause an organization a few operational issues. Cloud automation and its frameworks help businesses tear down the sophistication of these deployments and simplify the functional processes. With the IT department and its operations working smoothly, the benefits extend to all the departments of an organization.

Easy cloud management and rapid deployment

Organizations look to market their products as fast as possible as the business environment gets even more competitive. An enterprise requires proper preparation to manage and deploy cloud IT environments successfully and effortlessly. Cloud automation and orchestration help businesses integrate, supervise, and deploy network devices, virtual machines, and routers rapidly and efficiently.

Reduce costs of IT infrastructure

Physical servers are costly, forcing you to pay for the entire cost irrespective of your usage. In fact, testing, using, or deploying a new feature requires additional hardware. On the other hand, the cloud infrastructure enables organizations to pay only for what they use. Deleting resources is easy on the cloud. Cloud automation drastically reduces the workforce, time, and resources spent on the IT infrastructure, reducing the overall operational cost.

Resilience

A network outage or a security attack can be a nightmare for an enterprise. Implementing cloud automation and testing fortifies the system’s resilience with continuous monitoring and effective cloud management. As cloud automation finds and flags potential problems, they address them automatically. When a server failure occurs, cloud automation shift workloads to momentary standby servers in other sites letting business continuity.

Streamline the operations

Though the cloud boosts businesses in their operations, manually handling even the most mundane tasks becomes tiresome. IT teams must leverage cloud automation and orchestration to streamline their processes and give the organization a healthy edge. Cloud automation frees unused resources and optimizes the utilization of critical tasks and processes.

What cloud process can we automate?

Organizations and their IT teams utilizing the cloud infrastructure can automate various tasks to lower their IT costs, reduce errors and increase their functional efficiency. Let’s check on the cloud automation examples.

Launching infrastructure-as-code (IaC)

Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the process of handling tech stack using code rather than relying on configuring individual hardware. Along with virtualization, cloud platforms can discover computing resources on the network and contain them in pools, allowing IT teams to deploy resources flexibly nevertheless of their physical configuration or the location of the servers. The organization can avail the resources directly from the pool, allocating as needed for their configuration items. As a result, the enterprise gets an IaC, where users can execute the automated process to receive the hardware configuration without manual effort.

Automating backups

Data backup is a critical function an organization must perform, even if the cloud hosts the data. Regular backup prevents data loss during a failure or unforeseen crisis. Often, the IT teams personally perform these data backups. However, this manual process on a fixed schedule is time-consuming and strips the manual workforce of their time spent on daily operational tasks and more complex roles. With cloud automation, the IT teams reduce the burden off their shoulders, letting the system perform them on a schedule with no manual intervention.

Setting version control for the workflow

Organizations often collect sensitive data that have stringent privacy and security requirements. Cloud automation and its tools help enterprises establish version control for workflows to leverage the data. The organization can use the same configuration each time someone access or modify the data.

Types of cloud automation

Enterprises perform two kinds of cloud automation – the first to support data center functions and the other to host web and mobile applications at scale

In the first type of cloud automation, IT teams seek to leverage the advantages of the public cloud, like self-service, guidelines, rapid provisioning, and automated operations in their on-premises private cloud or hybrid cloud. With SDN and load-balancing utilities, cloud automation boosts the network traffic speed even while serving millions of applications.

Web and mobile apps run on various microformats, each requiring a dedicated environment to scale with the traffic. The server platforms implement database replication and synchronization along with continuous automated anti-virus scanning and load-balancing activities.

Cloud automation vs cloud orchestration

Cloud automation and cloud orchestration are two vital yet different aspects of developing a solid cloud infrastructure strategy. Businesses must understand the difference between these terms as it helps them implement a perfect system that increases efficiency.

Cloud automation is the process that involves the use of cloud management tools to achieve tasks without any human interference. The jobs might include auto-provisioning servers, performing data backups, or uncovering and annihilating unutilized processes to improve efficiency and decrease manual workload.

On the other hand, cloud orchestration is the process of strategically organizing automated tasks to achieve cloud infrastructure objectives by fusing low-level tasks into processes and harmonizing them across the entire cloud infrastructure consisting of multiple locations or systems.

While cloud automation involves automating and managing tasks, cloud orchestration coordinates them with a unified approach to accomplish goals. In unison, cloud automation and orchestration prove to be the perfect duo that brings an organization a sea of benefits.

Conclusion

Cloud automation and orchestration are now an integral part of an organization’s cloud strategy. Want to know more about how cloud automation benefits your business or why do we need cloud automation?? Let’s discuss and take a step ahead in your cloud automation journey.