Cloud migration enables IT organisations to rapidly scale and adapt, accelerating innovation, improving business agility, streamlining operations, and lowering costs. It not only assists businesses in navigating uncertainty, but it can also lead to increased long-term growth. However, cloud migration presents its own set of challenges.
Cloud adoption entails organisations transitioning from provisioning and managing static infrastructure (private data centres) to dynamic infrastructure across public clouds.
However, dynamic infrastructure necessitates IT teams 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 businesses to rapidly develop, deploy, and scale cloud applications while controlling costs and mitigating risks.
The following are the key areas where organisations must incorporate automation to fully realise the cloud’s potential:
Table of Contents
1) Cloud Security
When using multi-cloud, manual errors can increase significantly, making it difficult for organisations to monitor and secure various cloud-based systems.
Cloud automation can assist in automating the configuration of various firewalls, access points, and networks, addressing any manual errors that may have resulted in insecure infrastructure.
Organizations must incorporate the following key cloud infrastructure automation security capabilities into their IT workflow:
Authentication and Authorization
Organizations must use cloud-based directory services, such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory and AWS Identity and Access Management, to manage and control user access to critical information. This allows organisations to easily and securely automate onboarding, offboarding, and user access audits.
Endpoint Security
Deploy automatic threat detection tools, such as Amazon GuardDuty and Azure Defender, to monitor your cloud environment and automate processes like alerts and threat response.
Network and Infrastructure
Organizations with large infrastructure must automate network provisioning and connectivity to maintain adequate security and functionality.
To ensure adequate security and functionality, organisations with large infrastructures must automate network provisioning and connectivity.
2) Cloud Data Management
Organizations must implement strong data management service policies and procedures in the cloud to leverage data as an efficient and effective business asset. They must be able to rapidly scale their data management capabilities and infrastructure.
With massive amounts of data to process and handle daily, automation is critical for cloud storage and backup.
Cloud Storage
Organizations are using cloud-based object storage services, such as Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, and Azure Blob Storage, to store practically limitless amounts of data in rapidly expanding but isolated pools of data.
However, if IT teams fail to properly secure the data in these storage buckets, it will be exposed. To ensure the proper security of the data stored, organisations must use these services’ programming interfaces.
Cloud Backup
Backing up data and other important assets is critical for any organisation that wants to resume operations after an unintentional disruption and minimise the costs associated with it.
Automatic backup and restoration systems are programmed into cloud platforms to perform data and infrastructure backups regularly.
Logging
Regular monitoring and auditing of cloud infrastructure and applications generate a large volume of logging data, which can be difficult for organisations to manage.
Use logging tools like Google Cloud Logging, Azure Monitor, and AWS Centralized to easily store, search, analyse, monitor, and alert on log data and events. This increases system administrator productivity and helps to contain misconfigurations and threats much faster.
3) Infrastructure Management
Organizations that use cloud-based infrastructure can automate a variety of repetitive tasks to avoid misconfigurations, reduce manual errors, reduce IT costs, and improve efficiency. Some of the use cases are:
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code automates the provisioning of IT infrastructure, allowing organisations to develop and deliver cloud apps more quickly, with less risk, and at a lower cost. To automatically provision individual elements or the entire infrastructure in the cloud, use tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Terraform.
Containers
Containers enable a standardised operational model for cloud-native applications in a variety of environments, including public, private, and hybrid. Use managed Kubernetes services like Azure Kubernetes Service. Google Kubernetes Engine and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes for containerized application deployment, management, and scaling.
DevOps
The use of automation tools in DevOps reduces manual intervention in processes that facilitate feedback loops between Dev and Ops teams, allowing iterative updates to be deployed to production applications more quickly.
Automation in DevOps encompasses the entire DevOps pipeline, which includes continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous testing.
To summarise
Though the cloud plays an important role in reducing organisational burden, automation has become critical in automating many critical cloud operations such as resource provisioning and configuration, clustering and load balancing, deployments, monitoring, and management performance.
Now is an excellent time to automate cloud infrastructure and fully realise the cloud’s potential.
