Is your business falling behind in the race to the top?

Your business moves fast. Different, often-competing units within your enterprise want to achieve business priorities, drive efficiencies, and rapidly produce revenue. They’re relying on IT to provide the resources necessary to grow fast. They need what they need and they need it now—as in yesterday.

How can you ensure fast compliant delivery of resources—be it virtual machines (VMs), applications, public cloud resources, or other types—so your business can grow quickly without friction and delay? The answer: IT automation.

We’ve recently posted our latest eBook, The 7 Secrets of IT Automation, which gives you the opportunity to learn a step-by-step action plan to unlock the potential of your hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

This is the first in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven secrets. This week we’ll look at Secret 1: Choose to Offer Self-Service IT As Your New Normal, Not the Rare Exception.

Secret 1: Choose to Offer Self-Service IT As Your New Normal, Not the Rare Exception

The dream of self-service IT to help accelerate digital transformation no longer has to be a figment of your imagination. In the past, everyone involved in the IT automation and provisioning process needed to be an expert in scripting, and governance challenges could be a nightmare. Plus, being an expert in various hybrid cloud and multi-cloud technologies was as essential as knowing the business outcomes. A lack of hands-on knowledge of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Terraform was slowing down the pace of development. No more.

Make self-service IT a central pillar of how your business operates. Implement user-friendly catalogs with easy-to-understand and implement blueprints so provisioning resources such as compute, storage, or backup is a snap. And your self-service IT framework should adhere to your governance and compliance standards so you never have to worry about costly mistakes. Commit to SS-IT and don’t look back.

Secrets No More: Unlock the Power of IT Automation. See How CloudBolt Can Help.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

The Hybrid Cloud: What You Need To Know

Tom Taulli, Forbes, March 5, 2021

“‘The absolute wrong question a CEO should ask his CIO is this: ‘How fast are we moving to the cloud?’ The right question is this: ‘Are there business applications that will benefit our company and our customers with new innovations if we ran them in the cloud?’ For some applications, the answer today is yes, for some the answer today is no. Over the next few years, we see continued growth in software solutions that bridge from the private datacenter to the cloud, e.g., hybrid environments. Eventually, those datacenters will decline so that we no longer see hybrid landscapes, but even as applications move to the cloud, the need to integrate those applications in order to deliver new business value will continue to grow.’

Yet there are inherent problems with the hybrid cloud. The fact is that there is much heavy lifting with integration, which has its own risks. The costs are usually higher and there is less agility as well fewer functions and features when compared to the pure cloud.”

Multi-Clouds Spectacular Treasure Trove To Arise Via Amalgamation Of Autonomous Vehicle See-All Data

Lance Eliot, Forbes, March 4, 2021

“A recent news announcement that garnered some outsized headlines provides ample indication of how multi-cloud amalgamations are soon going to emerge as a vital cornerstone of commerce and proffer savvy opportunities across all industries and sectors of business.

A cavalcade of hospitals announced that they are banding together to create a supercharged data collection of health data. Top named hospital systems such as Tenet Healthcare, Trinity Health, Aurora Health, Providence, and others are forming a virtual multi-cloud collective, doing so as part of the startup launch of Truveta Inc. (a newly formed company that will aggregate, analyze, and sell anonymized health-related golden nuggets, as it were).

A tagline that astutely goes with this multi-cloud formulation is the notion of saving lives with data.”

Cloud Migration Monitoring: A Practical Guide

Gilad David Maayan, DevOps, March 9, 2021

“Tracking application traffic can help you validate that application configurations are properly defined and validate the availability of the entire application. You should ensure that all requests arrive to the new server, and keep an eye on the error rate. Additionally, watch for response times to ensure your application is not exceeding the planned thresholds.

Tracking costs can help you ensure that you are not incurring unexpected losses. The majority of organizations migrate to the cloud to reduce their costs. However, incorrect implementation of cloud resources may lead to losses. You can gain visibility into your costs by leveraging first-party cloud tools, like AWS Billing, which natively integrate into the pipeline, monitor costs, and show visualized data in customized dashboards. You can also use these tools to set up alerts. 

Application security monitoring can help you identify security vulnerabilities and incidents during and after the migration process. You should monitor infrastructure configurations, such as internal traffic, host open ports and instance processes that are actively accessing different services. Additionally, keep watch for API hits per second, which might indicate a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

If you’re looking for vRealize Orchestrator workflow examples, then your organization is probably ready to dive into IT process automation. IT process automation is the ability to integrate and orchestrate tools, processes, and people through workflows. vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is an often-underrated tool from VMware that organizations can use for process automation.

Why You Need to Invest in Orchestration/Automation

Before you begin your automation journey, you must understand why your organization needs automation. Here are some reasons for implementing automation in modern-day organizations:

Using VMware vRealize Orchestrator for Automation

One of the critical features of vRO is the ability to create and customize the presentation layer. This nifty feature allows you to control the way a user running the workflow can provide input. You can achieve this by providing drop-down menus. A user can select a predetermined value. Alternatively, it can generate a value based on an action. It’s possible to change the value in a drop-down menu based on the value of another drop-down menu. Controlling input helps to eliminate human error and reduces the failure rates of workflows. 

vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Examples

vRO’s real power is its ability to create, reuse, combine, and extend existing workflows or actions to create new ones. Some include creating a workflow to obtain IP addresses from Infoblox and inputting this information into a Deploy a VM (virtual machine) From a Template workflow. This allows the central management of IP allocation for VM deployments. You can also go a step further by adding a Send Notification workflow. This sends the requestor an email when the workflow fails or completes successfully.

Other vRO Practical Applications 

Here are some practical examples of using vRO to automate processes within your organization:

Eight Steps for Developing vRO Workflows

Using vRO for automation shouldn’t be too difficult. Here are the eight cortical steps for processing automation through vRO: 

Understand the Process/Task 

Identify the tasks and processes that occur regularly and take too long to complete because of the complexity or number of steps involved.  

Find Out if the Process/Task Is Worth Automating

Sort out and filter the processes/tasks into the amount of effort required to execute them. Notice the frequency with which they occur. This way, you’ll be able to identify the critical processes you need to automate. 

Document the Process

Make sure to thoroughly document the whole automation process.

Make Sure You Can Complete the Task/Process Manually First

It’s important to try to complete the process manually first. This allows you to identify different inputs, outputs, errors, and integrations that may inform automation decisions. Automating a process that you can’t complete manually can be problematic. If there’s an error, troubleshooting becomes hard since you can’t figure out what’s at fault between the process and the automation. 

Draw the Process as a Workflow 

Visualize the workflow and logic decisions that you’ll need to make to help with the overall process. This helps identify shared/reusable components. 

Create the Process Workflow

Creating a workflow is an agile process that involves continuous testing and changes until the workflow is complete. 

Conduct End-to-End Tests

Testing is critical for workflow development. You should have a representative test environment to avoid affecting your production environment. Test all decisions and logic in the workflow to ensure you understand all outcomes. Doing this is particularly important if you have multiple exit points to the workflow. 

Document the Workflow

Documentation is one of the most important steps in the automation process. It helps with ongoing workflow development and allows others to reuse the workflows created. Devs need to understand the association between the inputs and outputs and the workflow to use them.

Learn more about our tools for enhancing your vRO experience. Discover CloudBolt today.

Is your business falling behind in the race to the top?

Your business moves fast. Different, often-competing units within your enterprise want to achieve business priorities, drive efficiencies, and rapidly produce revenue. They’re relying on IT to provide the resources necessary to grow fast. They need what they need and they need it now—as in, yesterday.

How can you ensure fast compliant delivery of resources—be it virtual machines (VMs), applications, public cloud resources, or other types—so your business can grow quickly without friction and delay? The answer: IT automation.

We’re excited to walk you through the seven secrets your organization can immediately use to start meeting the needs of digital transformation through IT automation. These recommendations no longer have to be secrets; they can be the roadmap for your action plan to change how you operate.

You can get started on this journey now. Read the new CloudBolt eBook, “The 7 Secrets of IT Automation,” right here. And if you’re ready to see how a next-generation cloud management platform can help, reach out to us here.

Ready to know the secrets to make your digital transformation a reality? Read “The 7 Secrets of IT Automation” now.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

Cloud Migrations Demand Risk and Compliance Maturity

Padraic O’Reilly, DevOps, March 2, 2021

“According to Gartner, by 2022, 30% of all security teams will have increased the number of employees working remotely on a permanent basis and by 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services. The distributed cloud enables organizations to provide products and services when they’re needed in this era of work-from-anywhere, whether to their employees or customers.

Even in sectors such as energy and utilities, which are historically heavily reliant on standard on-premises installations and had often avoided cloud adoption, business leaders are realizing the value of migration, especially in light of the global pandemic. These businesses are able to deliver digital products with speed, experiment with tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) to increase productivity and to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) across assets, among other benefits. Still, cloud migration risks abound, and new challenges may arise. A risk that cannot be ignored is the cybersecurity risk. Meeting regulatory IT compliance and managing risks involved with cloud computing are top challenges facing those migrating their workloads to the cloud.”

Public Cloud: Managing Cost, Risk, and Governance

Sean Donaldson, CIO, March 1, 2021

“In fact, in a recent study, more than eight in 10 organizations said the cloud is more important today than it was one year ago.

It’s worth noting that the complexity of the cloud environment is growing nearly as fast as the adoption rate. Organizations looking to move workloads such as their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to the cloud face a growing number of options when it comes to selecting a cloud provider. And each cloud provider offers a variety of configurations, features, and tools. With all of this in mind, organizations moving workloads to the cloud would be well served to look for a partner that understands their unique needs, such as a managed services provider (MSP).”

Top 5 things to know about hybrid cloud

Tom Merritt, TechRepublic, March 1, 2021

“Most everybody’s doing it. That doesn’t always mean it’s the right thing to do but it does have momentum–60.9% of organizations globally are either piloting or already using hybrid cloud according to NTT.

If you’re not using it, you’re planning to. Of those surveyed by NTT, 32.7% said they plan to push for a hybrid cloud solution in the next two years.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

Cloud integration platforms are tools that allow enterprises to take full advantage of the promise of the cloud. These tools come with features and functionality that facilitate integration between on-premises and cloud systems.

Without a seamless connection between these disparate systems, organizations would struggle to run mission-critical processes that deliver business value.   

How to Leverage Cloud Integration Platform Technologies 

Organizations of all sizes acknowledge the benefits of using cloud integration platforms. Here are some examples of how industry leaders use cloud integration tools. 

Collaboration

Growth is the name of the game for many enterprises today. And enterprises often characterize growth by connecting with a new partner or customer. Ideally, you want onboarding in your organization to happen within a matter of hours, not days. But you cannot always guarantee this. 

Cloud integration platforms make the onboarding process faster and more efficient. You can rapidly connect to a partner’s business processes and systems and save precious resources and time. As a result, your organization achieves a faster time to value.

B2B Data Exchanges

By using an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) platform, organizations hold their integration technologies in the cloud instead of on-premises behind their firewalls. This allows for seamless management of data since the platform enables organizations to receive data in real time. The modern-day organization needs to have data available at the right time and place every time.

Embedded Integration

Using cloud integration platforms enables organizations to harness embedded integration technologies. This is another innovative cloud integration mechanism. Software as a Service (SaaS) organizations often find it difficult to enable in-house private cloud technologies to communicate natively across business boundaries. Native communication between systems facilitates the movement of data and supports integration between services and customers. 

With embedded integration capabilities, organizations can use B2B tools and features to connect customer systems and create secure data gateways. This helps create seamless customer interactions with faster, more reliable communication.

Save Money

Cloud integration platforms make it easier and more affordable to set up, deploy, and manage integrations within the organization. This is because you don’t have to hire a specialist or bring in more full-time employees to manage integration internally. 

In comparison, traditional integration is often cumbersome and necessitates creating custom connections to third-party applications individually. This can be expensive and time-consuming.

Configuration

Often, organizations have to make changes in IT systems to accommodate customer or partner needs. When this happens, it’s important to make the necessary changes fast. Having a cloud integration platform enables you to make changes whenever you require them. In addition, the platform gives you the full configuration capabilities of your organization’s entire portfolio.

Conclusion

Choosing the right cloud integration platform is critical for your success in the cloud. The right platform should provide the tools and capabilities your organization needs to achieve agility and speed. The CloudBolt OneFuse platform comes with sophisticated tools and features needed to thrive in this era.

See the difference of our cloud integration platform. See CloudBolt in action today.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

How to improve cloud automation for this year?

Megana Natarajan, Enterprise Talk, Feb. 23, 2021

“Most of the bigger cloud platforms provide built-in visibility discovery features and these might serve the purpose if users are working with a single environment or a provider. However, in hybrid multi-cloud or even multiple account/subscription environments, native tooling can’t bring together all data in a single view.

Such a situation entails that enterprises would have to manually handle the requirement with a range of tools instead of automatically collating it into a single place. The second method is a better approach, especially for diverse, complex environments. A cloud monitoring or management platform that provides the single view capability is essentially, automatically combining all the required data to one place. It can simplify long-term operations.”

Calculating cloud migration costs: What CIOs need to consider

John Burke, TechTarget, Feb. 23, 2021

“On average, enterprises spend about 12% more to run a workload in IaaS than they do running it in their own data center. That average encompasses both workloads on which they manage to achieve great savings and those on which costs double or triple when compared to the cost of providing the service themselves. The more work that is lifted and shifted without modification, the more likely it is that the CIO will have to budget for cost increases.

CIOs who want to plan for a cloud migration, even if they are not doing so in order to save money, must take care to model cloud migration costs not just for what they will spend in the cloud environment itself, but also for the planning and migration phases and all the costs of operating the cloud environment once it is established. Failing to do so can invite unpleasant surprises for the rest of leadership — including the CEO and the CFO.”

Demand is high for full-stack observability with business context

Esther Shein, TechRepublic, Feb. 23, 2021

“The shift to digital-first business models to weather the storm and minimize the commercial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has placed technologists at the forefront of their organizations’ response. This forced a 3X acceleration of digital transformation projects, according to the AppDynamics research.

The new research also highlights the fact that rapid digital transformation has added staggering technical complexity throughout IT departments, with technologists listing the following factors as key contributors: a new set of priorities and challenges (80%), technology sprawl and a patchwork of legacy and cloud technologies (78%), acceleration to cloud computing (77%), multiple, disconnected monitoring systems (74%).”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud cost control is critical for enterprises looking to rein in their AWS costs. To achieve cost optimization and control, organizations must look deeper and across their cloud portfolios to see where they can save. 

Often, organizations make the mistake of focusing too much on the cost of running VMs. When they do this, they miss out on cost optimization opportunities elsewhere. It’s important to consider additional cost drivers, such as containers, networking, and other services. 

The Four-Step Cycle of AWS Cloud Cost Control

At a basic level, you can break down the process of controlling AWS costs into four steps:

Organizations can build asset awareness through inventory tracking, tagging, and analysis. You should understand what resources you have and their relationships with each other. Also, pay attention to the applications these resources support. 

Set monthly and yearly benchmarks so you can use them to forecast budgetary needs. 

Make a habit of going over available services, discount programs, and resources. This allows you to keep tabs on new features and developments that might allow you to save on cloud costs. 

This includes right-sizing cloud resources and analyzing current commitments for efficacy and utilization. It also includes upgrading to the most recent instance generations and validating any new commitments. 

Key AWS Cost Optimization Areas

AWS EBS Pricing

If you use Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), then EBS (Elastic Block Store) is your persistent storage during and after instance usage. EBS is scalable and flexible and is perfect for mission-critical applications and systems. 

There are different ways to optimize costs for EBS volumes. You can switch volume types, dynamically increase volume, tune performance, and change provisioned IPOS (input/output operations per second) on live production environments.

You can control EBS costs by:

You can learn more about EBS pricing here. 

AWS Data Transfer Pricing

Data transfer costs on AWS can easily get out of hand if not well-managed. There are different data transfer types available on AWS, and it’s a challenge to keep track of the associated costs. Understanding the intricacies of data transfer costs is the first step toward controlling these often confusing costs. 

In a nutshell, you can manage data control costs by:

You can learn more about data transfer pricing here. 

Disaster Recovery Pricing

One of the biggest challenges IT personnel deal with today is preventing disasters occasioned by product loss and business outages. Organizations use the AWS Disaster Recovery Plan to help restore data when disaster strikes. 

The pricing of AWS disaster recovery depends on the plan you choose. Some of the plans available include: 

The key to controlling disaster recovery costs is to choose a data replication strategy that best suits your business needs. You can learn more about disaster recovery pricing here. 

AWS Savings Plan

You can make significant savings by going for an AWS Savings Plan over On-Demand EC2. But you have to commit to using a specified amount of computing power. 

AWS gives organizations two types of savings plans:

Savings plans should be a part of your AWS cloud cost control strategy if you’re looking to make significant savings. Learn more about AWS savings plans here.

The promise of public cloud is the allure of decentralization and agility. But without proper methods to gain oversight and ensure optimization, chances are you may be succumbing to a variety of sins that are costing you time, money, efficiency, and governance.

We’ve recently posted our latest eBook, Avoiding the 7 Deadly Sins of Public Cloud Costs, looking at all the ways your public cloud costs can spiral to the depths but also best practices for pulling your enterprise back up.

This is the sixth in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven sins. This week we’ll look at Sin #6: Keeping Disaster Recovery Snapshots for Too Long.

Sin #6: Keeping Disaster Recovery Snapshots for Too Long

Things can go wrong anytime. It’s malpractice not to account for disaster, so taking disaster recovery (DR) snapshots, especially when using public cloud for the first time, is important. But, these DR snapshots can get outdated fast, and cost a boatload to maintain for no good reason.

Make a plan for how long you want to backup your snapshots. It doesn’t matter where the snapshots are backed up: they’re costing you. Make it a rule that anything older than a certain number of months should be deleted forever.

Cleanse Your Organization of Public Cloud Cost Sins

Looking to learn more about the six other deadly sins of public cloud costs? Download the eBook today. Also be sure to check out our comprehensive AWS Cost Optimization Guide for best practices on AWS costs.

Save 20% on Public Cloud Costs, or We’ll Give You $1,000. Guaranteed.