Automation & Optimization

Automation & Optimization One of the biggest attractions of cloud computing is that you pay only for what you use. That’s a huge benefit if you spin down idle or under-utilized servers. But what most customers don’t know is there’s a different set of challenges that stops them from being agile in three areas:

Spend: Costs keeps rising and are problematic to forecast or manage.
Optimization: Sustaining peak efficiency is difficult with ever-evolving business drivers.
Automation: Day-to-day administration is a significant effort and demands new skills and tools.

IT consultants, agents and MSPs who can address these three problems can differentiate their services. Here’s the scoop on these cloud realities

Spend:

This challenge is compounded when companies can’t easily analyze their cloud costs or determine the financial efficiency of running a given service. Several factors contribute to the problem. First, it’s common for enterprises to lack clarity about exactly which services they need. Paying for unneeded options and foregoing ones that would benefit them can erode the benefits of the cloud. Second, many cloud-service bills are vague, so you as a partner simply don’t get the data you need to understand what’s driving the spikes and dips in costs. It also makes it nearly impossible to accurately allocate the cost of cloud assets to associated departments to manage charge backs.

How OPSIO can help?

Find out what cloud analytics are available to help you determine exactly where the money is going. Analytics will also help you understand customer usage patterns, and how patterns change over time, which will help you control costs.
Cloud-services invoices can often be vague and confusing. We ensure that if (or when) there’s a spike in cost, the invoice gives your customer the data they need, in a manner that’s easy to read and comprehend so they can understand exactly where that expense is coming from.
As a partner OPSIO will conduct reviews quarterly or even monthly to assess usage and spend, and help you get the most value from your cloud budget.

HOW MAY WE HELP YOU?

Whether you’re looking to migrate to the cloud, or already are in the cloud looking for operation or cost optimization, we’re here to help. Contact us today and we can help your business succeed.

Optimization:

Achieving cloud efficiency is an ongoing process. New instances are provisioned, usage patterns change, and providers add new services at breakneck pace. The challenge is to be able to quickly identify unused resources that should be shut down, underutilized resources that should be rightsized and instances for which Reserved Instances would have better rates.

Here is a comprehensive list of Optimization drivers.

Full transparency to cloud cost, usage, performance, availability and security.
Existence of well-defined reference architecture for all applications / workloads, which justifies costs with business value provided.
Existence of documented policies for managing infrastructure to optimum efficiencies.
Moderate to heavy utilization of cloud-based opportunities for cost optimization (e.g. reserved instances, spot nodes, burstable instance types, auto scaling groups).
Automated scaling (up and down) of infrastructure to support workload at the right performance and cost.
Automated failover.

Automation:

A cloud automation framework is a simple framework that automates certain operations within the cloud-based infrastructure. Cloud automation frameworks are generally split into three separate modules as follows.

Infrastructure Automation	Infrastructure automation is one of the most basic types of cloud automation; it involves creating templates for infrastructure that can then be easily replicated and deployed.
Deployment Automation	Deployment automation focuses on automating release and deployment of enterprise workloads.
Self-Healing Automation	Self-healing automation involves finding errors within the system and correcting them automatically, though those who are responsible for managing the infrastructure will still be notified of the errors.

Here are four organizational areas poised to change with the adoption of automation:

Efficiency	The on-prem model of data center infrastructure is often expensive to maintain. IT operations typically run up costs associated with staff, cooling, networking, servers, space, and data storage. The switch to cloud-based infrastructure significantly reduces operating costs and capital expenditures. Cloud automation provides insight into how resources are used while providing the tools to scale resource use accordingly. You don’t have to deal with the hassle of purchasing new servers for a temporary spike in demand or make a large investment that you only need for a short time.
Productivity	IT teams operating without automated cloud systems frequently must devote time to more mundane work such as maintenance and operations. Automation is a game-changer for yourself and your IT staff. Automation, rules and workflows through cloud computing will lessen the need for hours of labor dedicated to manual.
Automated Deployment	Automated deployment will improve the agility and performance of an IT team by reducing the occurrence of human error, improving collaboration, and providing greater availability of resources. Automation shortens the path from development to the go-live stage. Now, those manual tasks such as configuring databases, validating code, monitoring, and testing are repeated automatically. Don’t keep setting up configurations for each individual deployment; the configuration of automated deployments stays the same until changed, you could be one and done.
Resilience	If you’ve ever experienced an outage, then you’ve seen first-hand what a infrastructure failures can be for your company. Cloud service automation can make systems more resilient, automated systems constantly monitor for potential failures, responding when things go awry. Going beyond hot and cold centers, automation allows for failed servers to be replaced with standby ones. Using geographically dispersed high-availability, available servers are located automatically, and data is backed up to them. This ensures that critical applications are continuously available.

Our partners

We at Opsio are careful about which suppliers we work with and we place high standards of quality, environment and service. Below you will find a selection of some of the leading partners we have chosen to collaborate with.