Quality, speed, cost, and innovation is what will differentiate one service provider or IT department from another when it comes to the way organisations need to transform IT service delivery to cater for the 'new normal'.
Many IT companies are struggling to overcome the complexities of managing and maintaining large, legacy-based applications across diverse infrastructures. Pervasive virtualisation and new cloud initiatives can lead to infrastructure sprawl that increases operational overhead, further compounding the complexity problem. The global economic slowdown means IT budgets are flat, or declining, so IT has access to fewer of the resources needed to get the job done.
The 'instant gratification generation' and consumer technologies are raising the bar, while consumers expect an experience that is fast, secure and accessible 24x7 on any device from anywhere. C-level management views technology as fundamental to the business and expects IT to deliver innovation that drives competitive differentiation with game-changing results, and without impacting the bottom line.
Smart service
Unified automation offers an intelligent, service-driven approach that spans the entire infrastructure, application and service stack to orchestrate services across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It is characterised by a flexible, open, modular foundation that speeds implementation and accelerates time-to-value.
Its goal is to drive huge efficiency gains by enabling just-in-time service delivery at the exact quantity, quality and schedule that end-users need, without over-provisioning or excessive operational costs.
By orchestrating and automating complex processes, unified automation streamlines the development-to-production life cycle for ideas, applications and services. It simplifies operations by abstracting and absorbing the complexity of diverse, heterogeneous platforms, methodologies and toolsets.
Simply put, unified automation helps to increase business agility, responsiveness and competitiveness to close the gap between what IT is able to deliver and what the business/end-user demands.
Unified automation capabilities
A 2011 analyst report commented that the lines between various categories of automation are in fact becoming very blurred. Today there is unified automation, an approach where - when looking at infrastructure; application and service automation, along with capacity management and configuration automation - there is the same process automation and workflow throughout. So the same common process automation backbone and the same process automation technology in key solution areas apply.
Unified automation streamlines the development-to-production life cycle for ideas, applications and services.
Hannes Lategan is solution strategist at CA Southern Africa.
Unified automation is an extremely open, customisable solution designed for optimal flexibility, speed and efficiency. It is uniquely capable of aggregating and unifying management of all kinds of cloud services, regardless of where the cloud resides, how it was built or which vendor provided the underlying software or hardware. It offers a step-wise approach to building and managing clouds.
A broad range of enterprise-class capabilities are pre-integrated to form an open, modularly architected solution, so IT can easily match the right cloud approach to the right service.
With flexible cloud choice, IT can preserve existing investments by choosing a heterogeneous approach to cloud automation for some types of services, and a turnkey Grid Fabric approach for other service types. The latter offers extremely fast time to market for new services. Because it is designed for flexibility and control, it is the only solution that combines both a heterogeneous automation and Grid Fabric approach - IT can easily match the right cloud model to each service, move services between cloud models, and manage holistically across cloud models. Unified automation promotes innovation - increased speed, higher quality and a reduction in cost:
Speed - accelerate time-to-market:
* Aggregate and unify cloud management across vendors, platforms and silos.
* Transition to cloud service delivery model using a modular approach, so users can innovate at their own pace, based on their environment and objectives.
* Build a flexible, agile automated service delivery infrastructure.
* Collapse cycle time for getting business ideas into a production service.
Quality - exceed business needs and expectations:
* Create and deploy cloud business services, quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.
* Onboard new users quickly and simplify access control to shared infrastructure by streamlining service entitlement and user management.
* Measure and track all cloud service requests from submission to completion.
* Automatically invoice and charge for cloud service usage.
Cost - reduce service delivery costs:
* Preserve investment with broad resource support for physical and virtual, private and public cloud, including new converged fabric offerings.
* Consolidate infrastructure, pool resources and deliver on-demand as configurable, easy-to-manage virtual business services.
* Improve efficiency with intelligent, policy-driven placement and ongoing optimisation.
In my next Industry Insight, I will examine how unified automation contributes to business service innovation for the 'new normal'.
Share