Cloud Infrastructure Automation: The Imperative for Cloud Success!
Cloud migration enables IT organizations to scale and adapt at speed, accelerate innovation, improve business agility, streamline operations, and mitigate costs. It not only helps companies to propel through uncertainty, but it can also lead to increased sustainable growth. However, cloud migration introduces its own challenges.
Cloud adoption means organizations migrating from provisioning and managing static infrastructure (private datacenters) to dynamic infrastructure across public clouds.
However, dynamic infrastructure requires IT teams to manually provision and manage servers, operating systems, database connections, storage, and other infrastructure elements every time they want to develop, test, or deploy a software application. And, infrastructure automation comes to the rescue!
Cloud infrastructure automation enables organizations to develop, deploy, and scale cloud applications at speed while controlling costs and reducing risks.
Below are the prominent areas organizations must incorporate automaton to realize the full potential of the cloud:
1) Cloud Security
When multi-cloud is used, manual errors can increase significantly, making it challenging for organizations to monitor and secure different cloud-based systems.
Cloud automation can help automate the configuration of different firewalls, access points, and networks so that any manual errors that may have resulted in insecure infrastructure are addressed.
Organizations must incorporate these key cloud infrastructure automation security capabilities into their IT workflow:
- Authentication and Authorization
Organizations must leverage cloud-based directory services, including Microsoft Azure Active Directory and AWS Identity and Access Management, to manage and control user access to critical information. This enables organizations to automate onboarding, off-boarding, and user access audits, easily and securely.
- Endpoint Security
Deploy automatic threat detection tools like Amazon GuardDuty and Azure Defender to monitor your cloud environment and automate processes such as alerts and threat response.
- Network and Infrastructure
Organizations with large infrastructure must automate network provisioning and connectivity to maintain adequate security and functionality.
In case of Azure, use Network Security Groups to allow or deny inbound or outbound network traffic to and from different Azure resources.
2) Cloud Data Management
To leverage data as an efficient and effective business asset, organizations must implement strong data management policies and procedures in the cloud. They must be able to scale their data management capabilities and infrastructure on demand.
With massive amounts of data to be processed and handled daily, automation is crucial for cloud storage and backup.
- Cloud Storage
With rapidly expanding but isolated pools of data, organizations are using cloud-based object storage services, such as Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, and Azure Blob Storage, making it possible to store practically limitless amounts of data.
However, the data within these storage buckets will be at the risk of exposure if IT teams fail to secure it properly. Organizations must use the programming interfaces of these services to ensure the proper security of the data stored.
- Cloud Backup
Backing up data and other important assets is most imperative for any organization in a bid to resume business during unintended disruptions and minimize their costly aftermath.
Cloud platforms have automatic backup and restoration systems programmed to perform data and infrastructure backups periodically.
- Logging
Regular monitoring and auditing of cloud infrastructure and applications generate a bulk amount of logging data, which can be challenging for organizations to handle.
Leverage logging tools such as Google Cloud Logging, Azure Monitor, and AWS Centralized to easily store, search, analyze, monitor, and alert on logging data and events. This improves system administrator productivity and helps contain misconfigurations and threats much quicker.
3) Infrastructure Management
Organizations that rely on cloud-based infrastructure can automate a wide range of repetitive tasks to avoid misconfigurations, reduce manual errors, save IT costs, and improve efficiency. Some of the use cases are:
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code automates the provisioning of IT infrastructure, enabling organizations to develop and deliver cloud apps with enhanced speed, minimized risk, and reduced cost. Use tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Terraform to automatically provision individual elements or the entire infrastructure in the cloud.
- Containers
Containers facilitate a common operational model for cloud-native applications across environments, including public, private, and hybrid. Leverage managed Kubernetes services such as Azure Kubernetes Service Google Kubernetes Engine, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes for automating deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications.
- DevOps
Use of automation tools in DevOps limits manual intervention in processes that facilitate feedback loops between Dev and Ops teams so that iterative updates can be deployed faster to applications in production.
Automation in DevOps encapsulates the entire DevOps pipeline containing continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous testing.
In Conclusion
Though the cloud plays a prominent role in easing the organizational burden, automation has become key in automating many critical cloud operations such as provisioning and configuring resources, establishing clusters and load balancing, making deployments, monitoring, and management performance.
Now is the perfect time to automate cloud infrastructure and realize full cloud potential.
Veritis as Your Cloud Consulting Partner!
As a US-based cloud consulting services provider, Veritis offers a wide range of cloud services, including cloud strategy, cloud migration, cloud modernization, cloud infrastructure management, cloud security, and disaster recovery services.
Based on your business requirements, we utilize SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS service models to assist you in tailoring the perfect cloud solution.
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