Survive Today to Thrive Tomorrow - Manage your business operations through smart Cloud Management Platforms

In the late modern history era, the world was left to bear witness to multiple recessions. It started with developed countries and proliferated in other regions, continents, and developing economies. If we try to recall some of them, the likes of Depression 1920-21 in US, Great Depression of 1929, Latin American Debt crisis in the mid-70s, Bank Stock Crisis of Israel in the mid-80s, the Economic crisis in India (1991), bursting of Dot-com Bubble in 2000 and The Great Recession in 2008 come as “top of the mind”. The last recession had an extreme impact on the world economy and devastated world’s financial markets. As per leading financial market analyst firms multiple factors can drive a thriving economy to downturn like financial market crash, undervalue of housing property or market, higher interest rates, the aftermath of a war, inefficient management of assets and lower credit ratings, and slowdown of production rates.

We have welcomed the year, 2020 wholeheartedly as it led us to a new decade with more opportunities and challenges related to digital and technological transformation. But today what we are witnessing is unforeseen, unexpected by major financial and asset management firms. As per a study conducted by Moody’s in March 2020[1], verticals like automotive, tourism, travel, aviation, and retail will be most impacted whereas technology vendors, e-Commerce and old mining will grow at a decent rate. The growth numbers for these verticals are northbound because they leveraged technology to automate operations which kept them running during such unprecedented events. We will overcome this phase for other verticals, sooner or later though the aftermath of such event is more painful as recovery takes time due lack of resources and budget constrains!

Let’s focus on some key questions that may reveal the absence of a dominant factor that could have prevented economic downturn at such a scale:

• Did you know what technology you were looking for?
• How well were you prepared for big transformation projects?
• Did you overcome the fear of tech customization?
• Was your business model closely aligned with new age technologies?
• Do you think automation was a problem to streamline the operation?
• How did you manage your workforce?
• What was the state of your IT processes in terms of maturity (reactive, proactive or dynamic)?

The response to all these questions indicates the level of technology adoption by various enterprises across multiple verticals to run Cloud operations. You may get perplexed with the term business operations and Cloud operations but let me try to clear the fog, by stating that every enterprise thrives through transformation either by digital or technological advancements. The unpretentious business models are run with unabating robustness and flexibility, powered by technology in disguise of Cloud native applications, AI driven PaaS services etc. which act as a fulcrum and give impetus to drive both innovation and modernization. Therefore, to run a robust process-oriented business model, one needs to operate a glitch free Cloud operation.

We have observed that enterprises do face challenges to run a Cloud management platform  such as:

• Diminishing efficiency
• Decline in performance
• Cost obligations
• Security threats

Now, let us demystify the desired state that can be achieved through a solution from DRYiCE products such as DRYiCE MyCloud, which is a proactive multi-Cloud management platform that empowers organizations to optimally govern, provision, monitor, and manage Cloud infrastructure. It combines data exploration and data visualization in an easy-to-use Cloud native application that enables effective analysis and generates actionable insights for IaaS and PaaS resources. DRYiCE MyCloud’s data-driven recommendations and advisories ensure continuous optimization of enterprise Cloud environments across areas, including cost, performance, security, and utilization.

Let’s consider an enterprise using multiple Cloud platforms provided by Cloud service providers in their Cloud infrastructure.

Diminishing Efficiency in Operations

• Due to multiple Cloud platforms provided by Cloud service providers, it becomes difficult to obtain a clear visibility across Cloud resources and their usage
• Legacy processes and multiple disparate, idle systems result in zero automation and increases dependency on human resources
• Lack of understanding of the services that are being offered by Cloud service providers

In such scenarios, through MyCloud an enterprise can achieve higher delivery efficiency by:

• Shortening VM provisioning cycle by 85% through automation
• Automating the Day 1 and Day 2 tasks in server build processes
• The auto-decommissioning feature helps in shutdown of workloads once it has reached decommissioning date and notify users accordingly
• Customize tasks through inbuilt functionality and process workflows in the Cloud infrastructure
• Reduction in time for IP allocation by 90% through automation
• MyCloud supports almost every IaaS and PaaS service that has been listed by private (SCVMM and VMware) and public Cloud providers (AWS and Azure)

Decline in Performance of Operations

• Due to lack of visibility and control, the enterprise will be unable to track or monitor the utilization behavior or consumption pattern of Cloud resources and determine whether they are being underutilized/over utilized
• A dearth of skilled resources

By deploying MyCloud an enterprise can unlock:

• Inbuilt Cloud advisory and recommendation module which highlights,
  1. Faulty areas of Cloud resources that can impact performance like non-adherence to back up policies, whether critical resources are in high availability
  2. Highlighting the performance of Cloud resources to understand whether they are being underutilized or overutilized, or critical applications running out of resources

• The ability of the platform to manage higher volumes of workloads on various Cloud platforms and concurrent requests through its scalable and flexible architecture
• Robust integration engine to drive automation by reducing human intervention

Cost Obligations

• Cloud should help organizations in optimizing spends by identifying areas that influence cost wastage, but reality is far from what we perceive
• Due to faulty tracking/ monitoring of utilization, keeping a tab on who is consuming what amount of virtual resources across Clouds from different geo locations and how much should they be billed becomes a nightmare
• Most enterprises avoid or face issues in understanding software licensing due to its complex calculation and management. This results in software compliance issues and incur heavy penalties

Through MyCloud, an enterprise will be able to,

• Empower end users to configure/ define rates
• The Cloud advisory and recommendation module also highlights,
  1. Cost optimization opportunities related to deployed workloads that are under-utilized

• Inbuilt financial reports for individual Cloud platforms for analyzing overall Cloud spend
• Reduce internal cost leakages through metering/ billing and show back
• Simple licensing structure and easy maintenance for timely auditing

Security Threats

• Ensuring policy adherence and robust governance in crisis has appeared as a primary concern to have a secured environment due to
  1. Distributed workforce
  2. Lack of secured home networks and systems connected to it
  3. Unauthorized user access and non-compliance

• Enterprises seek solutions to safeguard their data investment

Keeping all these scenarios in consideration, MyCloud has been designed in a way which would help an enterprise by,

• Configuring customized organizational policies and approval mechanism through RBAC module
• The security recommendation report from Cloud advisory module highlights,
  1. Unauthorized ports that are open or accessible
  2. Unauthorized groups or users having access on workloads

• Supports token-based authorization and certificate-based communication with Hashing algorithms for additional security of sensitive data at rest or in transition

Now, it is important for an enterprise to remain relevant and competitive in a fast-changing market by introducing automation in their environment. Such initiatives will help the organizations to remain resilient, survive through difficult times by cashing in on derivatives of Automation such as reduced cost, enhanced efficiency and low security risks. This will enable organizations to thrive in future for greater dividends.

References

1. Moody’s Covid- 19 Impact heatmap, Coronavirus hurts travel-driven sectors, disrupts supply chain