Cloud is king. By 2028, Gartner predicts cloud computing will become a “necessary component” to stay competitive. The world is well on its way to this reality, with 72% of businesses defaulting to cloud-based services when selecting technology.
How organizations incorporate cloud technology is already evolving. Large enterprises now take a multi-cloud approach, running workloads in both public and private clouds. Workloads continue to move closer to the end user while sensitive data remains on-premises. The challenge is tying these ecosystems together to manage complex infrastructure requirements and gain deeper visibility.
But most organizations are not large enterprises, and even leaders in cloud deployments had to begin somewhere. In most cases, the cloud journey begins with a familiar setup — a hybrid IT shop.
The complicated move to multi-cloud
Hybrid IT is defined by the use of on-premises resources supplemented by cloud-based services. It’s the logical first step before expanding into multi-cloud, or using a hybrid-cloud mix of both public and private cloud.
Moving from hybrid IT to a multi-cloud approach creates new complexities for IT. Integrating disparate cloud services can be challenging, often requiring custom scripting to support in-house legacy solutions. Meanwhile, day-to-day management of cloud environments is too time-consuming for resource-strapped IT teams.
Successful cloud management requires reliable orchestration of workloads and resources, regardless of the underlying technology (public cloud, private cloud or on-prem).
Whether they’re orchestrating disparate workloads or eliminating manual tasks to meet business requirements in real-time, IT automation platforms provide foundational capabilities for large cloud environments.
When to implement hybrid IT automation
Organizations continue to shift workloads to the cloud to meet growing demand for digital services. This trend, a form of digital transformation,
IT teams should not wait for cloud demand to grow before deploying an automation and orchestration solution. You should implement an extensible IT automation platform while your organization’s cloud footprint is still small, ideally while IT is still hybrid IT.
By implementing orchestration after an expansion in cloud usage, IT teams risk:
- Service slowdowns as IT personnel manually respond to changes in business demand
- A lack of flexibility in responding to new challenges and emergencies
- A delay in cloud ROI as resource constraints make it difficult to realize the full potential of cloud services
Deploying an orchestration solution earlier in your cloud journey gives operators and developers more time to establish best practices and better understand the automation and orchestration software you choose.
What hybrid IT automation looks like
There are a few types of software you can use to manage both workloads and resources across hybrid IT systems, including workload automation and orchestration platforms. A hybrid IT automation solution provides key capabilities for integrating, managing and monitoring systems in disparate environments.
Ideally, you’ll find:
- API adapters that make it easy to connect to any endpoint, providing extensibility as your organization’s digital toolbox expands
- Centralized monitoring and reporting to prevent future issues and quickly respond when issues do arise
- Intelligent resource allocation to optimize workloads and manage execution servers across systems
- Low-code, drag-and-drop workflow designers to accelerate end-to-end IT process automation
- Out-of-the-box features such as change management, simulation testing, check-in/check-out and revision histories to streamline the DevOps lifecycle
A hybrid IT automation solution will most often have a centralized control panel for viewing workloads, services and resources across IT. This single source of control gives your developers the confidence to build cross-platform processes while eliminating manual processes from the operations side. These capabilities are essential to expanding your use of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.
How to leverage hybrid IT automation features and capabilities
Hybrid IT is the early stage of IT’s cloud journey. Moving into a multi-cloud setup is almost inevitable as you seek to avoid vendor lock-in and leverage best-in-class solutions. However, multi-cloud approaches are frequently hampered by complexity, increasing costs and changing priorities.
Hybrid cloud automation solutions can simplify multi-cloud management by enabling IT to design environments that span across multiple cloud-based and on-premises solutions.
Connecting to disparate systems and applications
Hybrid IT automation solutions offer extensibility through pre-built, programmatic integrations with major cloud vendors such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Oracle and IBM. Universal connectors can also be included for commonly scripted tasks.
They also enable users to build, execute and manage APIs (web services, REST APIs, .NET assemblies, stored procedures and command lines). This makes it possible for IT to connect any endpoint to its hybrid environment, preparing for future expansions.
IT automation solutions that connect to any endpoint can have a host of features such as data warehousing, business process automation, IT task automation and more — a virtually unlimited list of potential use cases as your cloud requirements evolve.
Deploying across cloud systems
Hybrid IT automation solutions, such as workload automation software or enterprise job schedulers, can enable IT teams to deploy schedulers and execution servers in the cloud, moving workloads closer to the end user and providing flexibility as cloud demand expands.
Some vendors provide flexible licensing plans that make it easy to shift licensed execution servers into new environments, simplifying your expansion into the cloud. Look for extensible workload automation solutions in cloud marketplaces.
Ensuring compliance
Extensible workload automation and orchestration tools standardize practices and meet compliance requirements across systems. For example:
- Enabling secure file transfer protocols including SFTP, FTPS, web tunneling and TLS/SSL
- Integrations with privileged access management solutions to secure and manage user credentials and passwords
- Maintaining complete audit trails for all actions, events and users within the environment
- Requiring documentation and authorization for new automations or changes to automations
- Supporting directory services such as Active Directory to assign permissions based on existing accounts and groups
Leveraging artificial intelligence
Business demands can rapidly shift, especially demand for cloud-based resources. Manual provisioning is too slow to meet demand in real time and can lead to unexpected cloud costs when servers are left idle.
Workload automation and orchestration solutions have automated provisioning capabilities that analyze historical data to plan for future needs while processing data in real time to meet dynamic requirements, including unexpected cloud bursts.
To complement these capabilities, vendors are starting to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor automation environments. Centralized automation platforms can handle performance data across the enterprise, enabling AI to detect future issues and offering IT teams new opportunities to optimize their automation environments across cloud and on-prem.
Providing self-service
As cloud needs increase in the coming years, IT teams will need to provide process automation capabilities to both technical and business users. Self-service automation, including web-based portals, enables non-IT users to execute and monitor processes that are critical to specific user roles. This reduces the number of tickets that IT services must respond to while boosting SLAs, as business users no longer have to wait for IT.
The future of hybrid cloud computing
New vendors, new technologies and cloud-native services are providing organizations with new opportunities to create new business outcomes, value streams and services — both internally and externally.
These technologies handle or generate vast amounts of data that necessitate new cloud services for processing and delivering. Organizations are already feeling the pressure to integrate across on-prem and cloud-based data centers — silos cannot be tolerated.
Workloads must be tied to resources for optimal efficiency, and data must move seamlessly between disparate applications. Cloud automation and orchestration is freeing up humans’ time and enabling innovation.
To continue keeping up, IT teams will need to centralize control over multi-cloud and hybrid cloud systems to be poised to automate and manage end-to-end processes that meet evolving business needs. And as AI takes center stage, a strong foundation will become even more important in the coming few years.
For businesses of tomorrow, a hybrid IT automation platform is indispensable.
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Hybrid IT automation FAQs
A hybrid IT system is an integrate IT infrastructure that combines on-premises, private cloud and public cloud services to leverage the unique benefits of each platform. The approach enables organizations to optimize their IT environments and keep sensitive data and applications on-premises while also taking advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness of cloud services for other workloads.
Hybrid IT systems are fundamental in the modernization of IT operations because they offer flexibility and strategic resource deployment.
Learn more about best practices For hybrid IT workload optimization.
Hybrid automation involves the use of automation tools that work across various components of a hybrid infrastructure. One example is using a centralized automation platform to deploy applications across different environments. Development and testing might occur in a cloud environment and production deployment could take place in a secure, on-premises environment. Not only will this enhance overall system reliability but it could help an organization achieve process consistency and drive efficiency.
Take a look at 7 Gartner IT automation trend predictions.
Cloud automation services are tools and technologies used to automate manual processes. They help teams configure, manage and orchestrate cloud resources with minimal human intervention. Common examples include automated resource scaling, backups, deployment pipelines and performance monitoring.
These automation tools are integral to the secure management of modern cloud environments and ensuring that IT systems are responsive to the needs of a business without the need for excessive oversight.
Check out our infographic to see how you can use Workload Automation to better manage virtual and cloud resources.
The three primary types of cloud solutions are:
1. Public cloud
This is the most common type of cloud computing, in which services and infrastructure are provided off-site over the internet and shared across multiple tenants. Public clouds offer vast scalability and are cost-effective due to their pay-as-you-go pricing models.
2. Private cloud
A private cloud consists of computing resources used exclusively by one business or organization. The private cloud can be physically located at the organization’s on-site data center or hosted by a third-party service provider. This setup offers greater control over data, which is deal for businesses with high data privacy and strict regulatory requirements.
3. Hybrid cloud
A hybrid cloud infrastructure combines public and private clouds, allowing data and applications to be shared between them. This enables organizations to more effectively manage their IT resources based on individual workload requirements.
Learn why and how to optimize your hybrid IT environment.
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