Methods and Practice for automating your cloud
Many organisations adopt cloud-based computing in order to achieve operational cost-savings but fail to build efficiency into their plans and purchases. This is crucial because it is so incredibly easy to spend a lot of your money on cloud-services if you are not careful.
Automation comes into play by enabling you to set-out in advance what your workloads are, budgeting for them and ensuring these are upheld. A good example is Pay Per Unit (typically ‘seconds’) pricing for cloud – you are renting a cloud and so every second is charged for; this in turn means the ability to turn off workloads during quieter periods saves you money.
In the above scenario we can use the Microsoft E5 license as an example – there are in fact some organisations that ‘return’ expensive E5 licenses over a weekend in order to achieve cost-savings which can be invested elsewhere. Automating a system like this would save even greater budget.
Fundamental improvements you can make now
In a multi-cloud environment you can benefit greatly from using RedHat Cloudforms. This tool enables you to seamlessly move your compute between clouds and make the most of savings across vendors. The alternative is to manage multiple clouds manually.
Using Remote Management software ensures you have full visibility of your cloud-hosted systems, the key here being that you can promptly administer cloud-hosted server farms, terminal servers and/or end-user devices.
Automating your knowledge management and creation is often missed, often to the detriment to your firm. There are enterprise-ready tools used by most of the world’s universities and governments, including critical systems such as the military – Moodle. Click the image for details.
Automating the migrating of workloads when there is vendor downtime enables you to de-risk your use use of the cloud. Business rarely have all data on a single physical server, it is critical not to fall into the trap of doing so with a single cloud-vendor.
Automating security is often left last but should always be the first thing your IT service provider does. It is more than just antivirus, an established automated patch process and web-app security is critical. Ideally once an issue has been detected or a patch made available, you can approve remediation and simply observe progress.
Automating as a small business
Many small organisations become wary when coming across ‘Enterprise’ tools as they can often work on the presumption of a large team doing a particular task, which does not reflect the reality of how a small business works.
Not all automation platforms fit this profile and thankfully the tools above are among those which are flexible and scale with your business.
If you are concerned about Marketing, HR and Payroll, IT Security or simply don’t have the budget – there are options available.
Your firm may not necessarily have the skills to adopt SME-focussed tools and that is totally fine. As with any function it is often more appropriate to bring in external expertise for these things.
Where can you find this expertise? For one, Hayachi Services are happy to help – we are proudly vendor neutral even with ourselves, we refer you to other firms if we are not suited to the task in question.
If you feel the workflow is fairly straightforward, consider speaking to JobCentre plus and your local universities to find or build that talent.
Before you start - plan, even a scribble is good
A man who does not plan long ahead will find trouble at his door.
