All around the globe, businesses are leveraging digital technologies to transform every facet of their internal operations and workflows. Especially, since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, more decision-makers have a consistent top priority—harness innovative technology to jump-start growth, speed time to market, and eventually improve productivity. 

Cloud automation is one such innovation that several investors are implementing in order to gain growth in revenue, meet the rising customer expectations, and enable cross-channel experiences. Cloud has empowered even SMBs with the capability to significantly respond to market demands by integrating technologies, tools, and digital infrastructure seamlessly with the existing business process. These advantages of the cloud have changed the competitive landscape of businesses by demonstrating that agility and velocity can beat scale.

The Need For Cloud Automation

Not just technology but even customer expectations are evolving at an unprecedented rate nowadays. Businesses are forced to keep up with these changes by adopting innovative technologies and meeting customer demands. But this is easier said than done because it would take years and a ton of money for companies to constantly evolve. 

To overcome such challenges, most businesses are moving to the cloud and are increasingly considering cloud migration as a strategic priority for businesses. Companies that depend on traditional practices remain stuck in a quagmire of legacy processes, methodologies, and technologies. And to overcome this predicament businesses and IT needs to take a step back and think holistically about their cloud operating model. Information technology (IT) has become an integral part of every enterprise to drive value and is considered a crucial enabler in meeting the companies and customer expectations of speed, flexibility, cost, and reliability. Therefore, it is imperative that the IT functionalities in an enterprise be automated in order to attain better productivity.

Also Read: Why Businesses Should Tackle Entrenched Traditional Barriers With Software Solutions

Several enterprises encounter the risk of failure quite constantly. This is mainly because of the growth in complexities and demands around new architectures, agile application development, on-demand access to infrastructure through self-service, cloud migration, and distributed computing, to name a few. But if set up correctly, cloud automation and cloud infrastructure can quickly expand access to new services and products, accelerate time to market for application teams, and cut operating costs at the same time—all of which unleash the business’s aim to increase productivity.

How Businesses Can Increase Productivity Using Cloud Automation

Most business owners are already well aware of the fact that automation reduces manual work, therefore, enhances employees’ productivity. But one of the most significant advantages of cloud automation is that businesses don’t need to start their digital transformation from scratch. Prebuilt workflows and already integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) services can bring automation to life in your business much more effortlessly and cost-efficiently. Here are some ways in which businesses can increase productivity by adopting cloud automation.

• Automated scaling

The automated scaling capability of the cloud means that virtual infrastructure can be easily deployed to meet the business’s growing demands. Since the deployment and provisioning of infrastructure are automated, new additions can be seamlessly made. 

Businesses can also increase or decrease the compute, memory, or networking resources required for the efficient working of their software solutions or ERP systems. Businesses only need to implement the autoscaling functionality only when required and will have to pay for just the services they use. This quick auto-scaling and integration of resources or infrastructure can help businesses enhance their productivity.

• Continuous integration and continuous delivery

Most enterprises, even large-scale software development companies, require a manual review and approval process for production deployment. For a production deployment, most enterprises make sure that it happens when expert software developers are available for support, or during low-traffic periods. But with the cloud, you can completely automate your development and test environments so that all a developer has to do is check in a change and an environment is set up for acceptance testing. Since the enterprise is running everything in the cloud, they will not have to buy or manage servers for builds or test environments. Also, testers no longer have to wait for a server to be available to perform the test. 

Also Read: The Three Cloud Service Models (PaaS, SaaS, IaaS): Here’s How You Can Choose The Right One for Your Business!

• Greater security and resilience

Automating cloud security empowers enterprises to secure their cloud environments, applications, and infrastructure seamlessly without the need for human intervention. Hence, business leaders will not have to spend time on security enhancements but can redirect their efforts to business innovation and growth. With the emerging trend of hybrid and multi-cloud environments that support individual applications, it is essential to monitor the complete business infrastructure using a single interface. But identifying and fixing the problem could be significantly time-consuming and resource-draining during a security attack. With the help of cloud automated security monitoring, the technical team and IT support engineers will be able to effortlessly leverage the right intelligence to address the attack and protect critical assets.

• Identity provisioning and management

In a large-scale business cloud environment, a single company may have thousands of different users and each user may require unique access to the multiple resources in the cloud. For businesses to set up access policies for all these individuals manually would be a tremendous task that requires huge human intervention as well as time. Also, keep in mind the employees handling this will have to constantly update it as new employees join the team or when old employees leave the company, making it much harder. 

But with cloud automation, identity management becomes much more efficient because businesses can use predefined Identity and Access Management (IAM) templates to set up user roles within the cloud environment. Businesses can also integrate their cloud IAM framework with a centralized enterprise directory service, like Microsoft Active Directory, to centralize identity management across the entire IT infrastructure, including on-premises resources as well as the cloud.

How ThinkPalm Can Modernize Your Business with Cloud Services

We understand that flexibility and scalability are the key drivers across various points in the business spectrum. ThinkPalm’s cloud implementation can help enhance platform efficiencies, improve operational adaptability and business scalability. Integrated Cloud Services at ThinkPalm empowers enterprises to meet their expected demands and dynamically scale cloud solutions as per their requirements. Starting with cloud consultation, we help enterprises create cloud solutions from scratch, as well as facilitate cloud migration, web application development. and update your existing applications to cloud platforms.

Also Read: How Can Businesses Enhance Cloud-native Application Development With Kubernetes?

As part of our cloud infrastructure management service, our engineers will work closely with your enterprise to implement a cloud IT Infrastructure based on your applications and services as well as the available bandwidth. From cloud consultation to deployment, we understand the customer business requirements and will define the cloud specification, increasing collaboration as well as productivity.

Author Bio

Ricky Philip is a content strategist, who has an unparalleled dedication to building productive and engaging website content that attracts traffic and increase search engine rankings. If not typing furiously on his keyboard, Ricky is constantly learning ways to enhance search traffic acquisitions.