There is a lot of confusion and hype about the cloud and SaaS (Software as a Service), and at Corent we experience it on a regular basis. One of the things I’ve been seeing and hearing about is the concept of a marketplace of cloud applications. I’ve observed that applications sold this way are often described as SaaS even though the key criteria of SaaS aren’t being provided to either the application vendor, or the application customer.
While it’s true that the cloud is a SaaS product, often the business applications provided on the cloud marketplaces are not.
Why Automate? What to Automate? How to Automate?
By John Dixon, Consulting Architect
Automation is extremely beneficial to organizations. However, the questions often come up around why to automate, what to automate, and how to automate.
Why automate?
There are several key benefits surrounding automation. They include:
- Saving time
- Employees can be retrained to focus on other (hopefully more strategic) tasks
- Removing human intervention reduces errors
- Troubleshooting and support is improved when everything is deployed the same way
What to automate?
Organizations should always start with the voice of the customer (VoC). IT departments need to factor in what the end user wants and what the end user expects to improve their experience. If you can’t trace back something you’re automating to an improved customer experience, that’s usually a good warning sign that you should not be automating it. In addition, you need to be able to track back to how automation has provided a benefit to the organization. The benefit should always be measurable and always financial.
What are companies automating?
Requests management is the hot one because that’s a major component of cloud computing. This includes service catalogues and self-service portals. Providing a self-service portal, sending the request for approval based on the dollar amount requested, and fulfilling the order through one or more systems is something that is commonly automated today. My advice here is to automate tasks through a general purpose orchestrator tool (such as CA Process Automation or similar tools) so that automated jobs can be managed from a single console. This is instead of stitching together disparate systems that call each other in a “rat’s nest” of automation. The general purpose orchestrator also allows for easier troubleshooting when an automated task does not complete successfully.
How to automate?
There are some things to consider when sitting down to automate a task, or even determining the best things to automate. Here are a few key points:
- Start with the VoC or Voice of the Customer, and work backwards to identify the systems that are needed to automate a particular task. For example, maybe the customer is the Human Resources department, and they want to automate the onboarding of a new employee. It may have to setup user accounts, order a new cell phone, order a new laptop, and schedule the new employee on their manager’s calendar on their first day of work. Map out the systems that are required to accomplish this, and integrate those – and no more. You may find that some parts of the procedure may already be automated; perhaps your phone provider already has an interface to programmatically request new equipment. Take every advantage of these components.
- Don’t automate things that you can’t trace back to a benefit for the organization. Just because you can automate something doesn’t mean that you should. Again, use the voice of the customer and user stories here. A common user story is structure as follows:
- “As a [role],
- I want to [get something done]
- So that I can [benefit in the following way]”
- Start small and work upwards to automate more and more complex tasks. Remember the HR onboarding procedure in point #1? I wouldn’t suggest beginning your automation journey there. Pick out one thing to automate from a larger story, and get it working properly. Maybe you begin by automating the scheduling of an appointment in Outlook or your calendaring system, or creating a user in Active Directory. Those pieces become components in the HR onboarding story, but perhaps other stories as well.
- Use a general purpose orchestrator instead of stitching together different systems. As in point #3, using an orchestrator will allow you to build reusable components that are useful to automate different tasks. A general purpose orchestrator also allows for easier troubleshooting when things go wrong, tracking of automation jobs in the environment, and more advanced conditional logic. Troubleshooting automation any other way can be very difficult.
- You’ll need someone with software development experience. Some automation packages claim that even non-developers can build robust automation with “no coding required.” In some cases, that may be true. However, the experience that a developer brings to the table is an absolute must have when automating complex tasks like the HR onboarding example in point #1.
What has your organization automated? How have the results been?
High-Performance Services Fabric
In the early days of cloud computing we talked a lot about how the economy of scale offered by cloud was achieved mainly through abstraction of resources. Compute, network and storage resources were abstracted and pooled together such that they could be provisioned as services on-demand.
That economy of scale ensured that the cost of using those services decreased, making them affordable for even the smallest of organizations.
In the data center, however, similar economy of scale has been difficult to achieve because the abstraction at the network layers has remained elusive. SDN has recently emerged as a front-runner in the data center as a provider of that abstraction, turning disparate network elements into a cohesive fabric of network resources, dynamically adjusted to deliver the best performance and availability to any application that might be delivered over its formerly rigid pipes.
High-Performance Services Fabric
In the early days of cloud computing we talked a lot about how the economy of scale offered by cloud was achieved mainly through abstraction of resources. Compute, network and storage resources were abstracted and pooled together such that they could be provisioned as services on-demand.
That economy of scale ensured that the cost of using those services decreased, making them affordable for even the smallest of organizations.
In the data center, however, similar economy of scale has been difficult to achieve because the abstraction at the network layers has remained elusive. SDN has recently emerged as a front-runner in the data center as a provider of that abstraction, turning disparate network elements into a cohesive fabric of network resources, dynamically adjusted to deliver the best performance and availability to any application that might be delivered over its formerly rigid pipes.
Cloud Computing at the Potomac Officer’s Club
Across the Federal IT landscape, terms like “cloud”, “cloud computing” and Software as a service (SaaS) are at the center of a seismic shift by the agencies away from building and managing every aspect of their IT infrastructure and services. The potential benefits of cloud computing within the Federal IT landscape are well known, and, the fact is that the role of every CIO across “.Gov” has shifted in a way that makes cloud very difficult to ignore.
The CIOs that lead the Federal government agencies are no longer solely responsible for the management of IT, but now face the added pressure of supporting business growth by reducing costs and driving innovation in a concerted effort to build a strategic advantage for their Agency. One part of the solution is certainly the cloud. Cost savings, elasticity, scalability, “load “bursting”, storage on demand… these are the advertised benefits of cloud computing, and they certainly help make for a solid business case for any Agency to use either third-party services or a virtualized data center.
Cloud Computing at the Potomac Officer’s Club
Across the Federal IT landscape, terms like “cloud”, “cloud computing” and Software as a service (SaaS) are at the center of a seismic shift by the agencies away from building and managing every aspect of their IT infrastructure and services. The potential benefits of cloud computing within the Federal IT landscape are well known, and, the fact is that the role of every CIO across “.Gov” has shifted in a way that makes cloud very difficult to ignore.
The CIOs that lead the Federal government agencies are no longer solely responsible for the management of IT, but now face the added pressure of supporting business growth by reducing costs and driving innovation in a concerted effort to build a strategic advantage for their Agency. One part of the solution is certainly the cloud. Cost savings, elasticity, scalability, “load “bursting”, storage on demand… these are the advertised benefits of cloud computing, and they certainly help make for a solid business case for any Agency to use either third-party services or a virtualized data center.
The Next Cloud Battleground: PaaS
Back in the day – when the Internets were exploding and I was still coding – I worked in enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture, for the record, is generally not the same as application development. When an organization grows beyond a certain point, it becomes necessary to start designing a common framework upon which applications can be rapidly developed and deployed.
Architects design and implement this framework and application developers then code their applications for deployment on that architecture.
If that sounds a lot like PaaS it should because deep down, it is.
SharePoint MVPs Offer Consulting in Exchange for Typhoon Haiyan Aid
On November 8, 2013, the deadliest typhoon ever recorded in history devastated the Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan was stronger than hurricanes Katrina and Sandy combined. It has been estimated that at least 10,000 people have been killed.
Dux Raymond Sy, VP of Customer Strategy and Solutions, AvePoint Public Sector, has organized an initiative that allows people to trade a donation to a charity of their choice for a one hour SharePoint consulting session with one of a variety of reknown SharePoint MVPs and leading experts.
For every $99 donation, the donator can have a one hour session ($99 = 1 hour; $198 = 2 hours; etc.)
The list of participating experts and MVPs includes Dux, Benjamin Niaulin, Naomi MoneyPenny, Jason Himmelstein, Mark Kashman, and nearly 70 others. Within these one hour sessions, donators can gain mentoring, coaching, training, trouble shooting, etc.
Embracing the New Enterprise IT: The Public Cloud
Cloud this and cloud that are on the lips of every IT professional. Beyond being an overhyped buzzword, cloud computing is a technology that’s innovating the way that many businesses, from startups to enterprises, handle their IT needs. Whether it’s specific applications or a complete infrastructure, cloud technology continues to transform the IT landscape.
Businesses have a few different cloud options to choose from: Public cloud services are run through third-party providers, whereas the private cloud is controlled directly by the business itself and distributes computing resources within the company. It’s also possible to use a combination of both. The public cloud provides a cost advantage and an overhead advantage to businesses, since you don’t have to pay for equipment cost or maintenance. However, the disadvantage is that you don’t have direct access to the hardware or software. It’s hosted offsite at the cloud service’s facility, which can raise some security concerns.
Cloud Storage Adoption Gaining Among Businesses
Cloud computing is helping businesses combat a growing problem: Too much information and not enough storage capacity.
With businesses increasingly facing the prospect of running out of storage capacity, adoption of cloud storage technologies continues to grow, according to a report from cloud-integrated storage solutions specialist TwinStrata.
The survey found that 37 percent of respondents have been using cloud computing for three or more years, more than a one-third increase over last year’s 27 percent number. When compared with last year’s survey, overall adoption of cloud services has steadily increased across all categories, with use of Software as a Service (SaaS) reaching as high as 62 percent and both cloud storage and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) edging closer to 50 percent adoption rates. Platform as a Service (PaaS) experienced the greatest increase in adoption as more organizations become increasingly comfortable with the cloud, the report indicated.