For IT professionals, there are several tasks and workflows that they need to run every day. Manually setting up and performing those tasks often wastes valuable time that workers can spend on more important projects. Thankfully, IT teams can take advantage of automation to automatically perform these workflows. This allows workers to focus on other workflows and processes that need manual attention. Tasks in the cloud are no different, as cloud automation is changing the way companies think about their cloud environment.
Cloud automation, quite simply, encompasses automating cloud workflows and cloud-native tasks. Enterprises using cloud automation can run, manage, and configure automated tasks hosted in their cloud infrastructure. To learn how your company can take advantage of automated cloud workflows, we’ve outlined the basics of cloud automation below.
What can be automated in the cloud?
Thanks to advances in technology and more adoption of automation by enterprises, IT workers are able to automate more tasks now than ever before. It’s no stretch to say just about any workflow or process can be automated now with the right knowledge and dedication. Enterprises can automate many kinds of tasks and objectives in the cloud, including:
Security
Securing your cloud environment is important, but manually setting up and running processes to detect breaches and security gaps can take a long time. In that time, a security threat might already have gotten into and infected your cloud system. Your enterprise can automate security sweeps to detect and alert you to any potential security breaches. You can automate these processes to happen as frequently as you want, meaning you’ll always have full security coverage.
Backup creation
While cloud providers guarantee that their services and any data you store on them will almost always be available, it still doesn’t hurt to keep backups of your information. In case something happens to the data you’ve stored in the cloud, you can automate the creation and storage of backups. This means your enterprise doesn’t have to worry about manually creating backups to save its data.
Cloud orchestration: managing cloud automation
Another essential aspect of cloud automation is cloud orchestration. Cloud orchestration refers to managing automated processes and workflows in the cloud. It involves configuring resources needed for these automated tasks to run and combining automated workflows into a single process that is automatically executed.
What should your company automate?
Just like workflows off the cloud, knowing what your company should and shouldn’t automate is important. Menial tasks that aren’t very time-intensive are perfect candidates for automation. However, you should always make sure you understand your cloud environment before you automate more business-critical and involved tasks. Setting up an automated task in the cloud improperly would potentially mean disaster for your company.
Our MSP Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top cloud MSP vendors for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as questions you should ask providers and yourself before buying. We also offer an MSP Vendor Map that outlines those vendors in a Venn diagram to make it easy for you to select potential providers.
Check us out on Twitter for the latest in Cloud news and developments!
Daniel Hein
Dan is a tech writer who writes about Cybersecurity for Solutions Review. He graduated from Fitchburg State University with a Bachelor's in Professional Writing. You can reach him at dhein@solutionsreview.com
- The 25 Best Cloud Managed Service Providers to Consider for 2024 - October 22, 2023
- The 18 Best Azure Managed Service Providers for 2024 - October 22, 2023
- The 6 Best Google Cloud Courses on Udemy to Consider for 2023 - May 1, 2023
