Self-Service IT Woes
Remember when you did something that triggered an unintended cascade of events—like selecting an orange or apple from a big cart in a grocery store and a bunch of them topple to the floor?
If it hasn’t happened to you, you’ve probably seen someone else do it and then look around and do a facepalm… whoops, should have been more careful.
The same thing happens in many other environments where you have the ability to select your own “anything.” For poorly administered self-service IT, you can select resources and end up toppling something IT related, like over-provisioning a set of servers and then letting half of them run and rack up charges on a public cloud. Someone in IT might be doing that facepalm when they find out how much of an overrun on a budget occurs.
It might be a matter of calibrating the flow of a resource or where it should be sourced. Compare this to adjusting a water valve and end up getting hosed down unexpectedly by not knowing the strength of the water pressure or maybe it was hot water when you expected cold.
The flow of self-service resources can be better customized with safety valves or other means so the delivery is smoother. Some grocery stores pre-bag quantities of vegetables or fruits so you can get a specified quantity without the hassle of selecting items yourself and possibly toppling the cart.
Blueprints to the Rescue
CloudBolt blueprints allow IT admins to customize the selection of IT resources using calibrated, “pre-bagged” items for end users. Here’s an example catalog of blueprints for resources that users can access—each one has been configured on the backend to make sure that self-provisioning goes smoothly.
Leveraging Auto-Select Environments
As a specific example of setting up a blueprint, one of our partners configured “sensitivity zones” in Azure so when end users are accessing resources to deploy in Azure, they are deployed to an “auto-selected” environment based on answering a set of questions. He has set up these three zones with three different accounts in Azure based on classification settings.
After demoing this functionality to our CloudBold engineering team, I asked my colleague, Steve Manross, to walk through a demo with me as well. Check it out here:
As you can see, with just a little upfront planning and configuration, you can avoid a lot of complicated self-service issues that might lead to a facepalm by you or your IT users.
