Automation: The Truth About the Easy Button
If there’s one thing the last year and a half has taught us, it’s the importance of building resilience and agility into our businesses, our teams, and how they operate. It’s no wonder, then, that the same pandemic response that accelerated organizations’ move to the cloud has also intensified the automation imperative.
Automation is table-stakes for faster, more efficient IT operations and business agility — but identifying the appropriate automation paradigm and how to best implement it can still be daunting. What should be automated next? What is the right set of automation tools for my organization? Do I have the team and skillsets to scale and harness the agility that automation can provide? The truth is, there is no easy button. But done right, a technology stack that leverages automation provides very real and critical advantages to organizations who are navigating the challenges and opportunities of a hybrid, multi-cloud world.
At the end of the day, your IT and dev teams — whether they’re building cloud-native applications, or managing these applications, workloads, or services across multiple clouds, on-prem, or the edge — want to do exceptional work that drives the business forward. Automation can free up precious resources and be a force multiplier to make that possible. But how do you provide teams with access to these capabilities in a way that is user friendly, can bridge open-source innovation with enterprise-grade resiliency, and support both contemporary and cloud-native use cases and workloads?
A Unified Operations Experience
Cisco’s answer is Intersight, its industry-leading hybrid cloud operations platform. Intersight unifies the operations experience across clouds and on-prem through a simple and powerful SaaS platform that delivers full-stack observability and a common vocabulary that bridges Dev and Ops teams and democratizes access to the tools they need to build manage and deliver modern applications. Through this single platform, Intersight provides cloud-neutral tooling for cloud-native development and a rich set of automation options across a common set of automation paradigms.
For companies looking to harness the advantages of automation, there are a ton of options out there, each with different purposes and strengths, and from organizations that may have very different philosophies. To hear these perspectives, I have personally invited three prominent voices and industry experts from the leading IT, data center, and cloud automation companies to our next Insider Series for Cloud webinar for a discussion about the challenges and opportunities in driving automation end-to-end across hybrid clouds.
- From Hashicorp, a company whose mission is to help companies better operate their infrastructure in the cloud through automation, we are joined by Amith Nair, the VP of Product Marketing who is responsible for overall positioning and messaging of the entire HashiCorp portfolio. Among his previous roles, Amith was instrumental in bringing Microsoft Office365 to market. Read the HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey.
- From Puppet, whose solutions help automate how companies continuously deliver, make compliant, remediate, and manage multi-cloud environments, Abby Kearns, Chief Technology Officer of the Puppet Enterprise Portfolio responsible for driving the company’s product vision and DevOps strategy. Before this role, Abby was the Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and helped accelerate the popularity and adoption of open-source technologies. Access Puppet’s State of DevOps report.
- From Red Hat, a leading provider of open source and automation technologies for enterprises, we have invited Richard Henshall, the head of Product who leads the strategic direction for the Ansible Automation Platform strategy. Before joining Red Hat, Richard was the lead technology architect for integrations and cloud architect at HSBC where he was a power user of Ansible. Check out AnsibleFest 2021.
Together, this panel’s goal is to provide you with a good look at the automation strategies and techniques that will achieve the most impact for efficient but agile hybrid cloud operations.
If you have had any questions about how best to use automation in your technology operations, please carve out an hour on to watch a reply of our webinar on hybrid cloud automation to learn from the best and the brightest minds in the business on this topic.
ceWatch a replay of our webinar on hybrid cloud automation:
The State of Hybrid Cloud Automation from Industry Leaders
Looks like the AnsibleFest 2021 link is a repeat of the DevOps report link