UNLOCKING CLOUD AUTOMATION STRATEGY
Harshad Prabhakar Sawant
Director | Head - Global Cybersecurity Engineering & Global BISO - IT Infrastructure & Cloud || IIM Ahmedabad
Cloud Automation Strategy is the important milestone while accelerating global cloud transformation.
Below are the phases to build overall cloud Automation Strategy.
Discover - Disrupt - Prioritize- Automate - Sustain & Evolve
DISCOVER :
This phase is extremely crucial on understanding current stage and maturity of Automation. We need to find all automation approaches developed by multiple teams, gather all siloed approaches on automation, create a common platform to gather all the ideas/solutions which eventually will help to drive strategic outcomes through Cloud Automation.
Crucial step is to engage Cloud teams willingly on importance of driving automation together and then discovering the overall problem statement which needs to solve with Automation Strategy.
Plan your discussions with teams and leaders just to identify the Automation scope and how Automation Strategy can help to accelerate overall Cloud Strategy.
Discover the controls on current automation from security front. we can drive future security controls accordingly in coming phases. Also do assessment on what skills you have vs you need to drive this Automation journey. Start Hiring accordingly.....Also develop automation training plan to close the skill gaps.
Congratulations You just did all requirement gathering and engaged all your workforce willingly for one mission.
DISRUPT :
This phase is to unlock and drive our innovation ideas to create Scalable Automation solutions.
While we can come up with all crazy solutions its important to maintain right balance with problem statement so that our discussions will be more productive and aligned with Global cloud strategy.
Right Disruption on cloud automation will accelerate overall cloud Strategy. Also my recommendation is to concentrate on big picture but at the same time to focus on small wins which will help us to accelerate and justify ROI to the management.
Building scalable platform for Automation as service : While we are implementing small automations; first we need to build a platform which is well integrated with ITSM and other infra tools to host these automations.
Most important steps to consider security approach while creating disruption. Every automation should be well thought through from security front.
Bringing AIOPS in Cloud Operations will help to accelerate more cloud Application onboarding seamlessly. Drive your disruption discussions with zero biased and stick to the alignment of problem statement and overall Cloud strategy.
Congratulations you have overall picture of automation to accelerate the cloud journey.
PRIORITIZE :
This is very important phase to channelize your disruption in alignment of Global Cloud Strategy and Business priorities. Gather all priorities of Cloud Migrations, Cloud Ops and Engineering, Cloud Fin Ops and prioritize your Automation features accordingly.
I will recommend this to drive with Agile SAFE ways. In my view this is the best view to drive cloud transformation.
Create all Important features of cloud automation and drive discussion to create detailed backlog to achieve. Understand your team strength and assign right person for right job.
AUTOMATE :
Execution should be theme of this phase. All our automation should be hosted on our Automation as service platform. Leaders need to do checkpoint after every iteration to see where we are on BIG picture and how our small wins are accelerating overall cloud journey.
Crucial factor for this phase is to Fail fast, celebrate failures and all small wins to motivate Cloud Automation team.
SUSTAIN & EVOLVE AUTOMATION MODEL :
Leaders also need start thinking on future automation and evolving strategy. It has to well directed and flexible.
Automation as service will allow everyone to Bring their own automation on scalable automation platform which we build in above phases. Automation should be mandatory for every new cloud onboarding services.
To evolve this model we need to create Automation Governance Board which will govern current automation model also bring all best practices to be relevant to current industry standards. This board will also evolve future needs of automation to drive the disruption.
Senior Project Manager | Cross-Functional Leader | Achieving 100% Results | Payments | SEPA | SWIFT| Fintech | LOS | LMS | MultiBureau | Cloud AWS | Security | Governence
3 年Dear Harshad, You have rightly pointed the vision on how the cloud Automation needs to be strategised. But on the Ground Level when the Implementation teams has to fulfil the objectives of what they needed to get this done needs lot of brainstorming with unique set of tools which will enable the Automation process within the cloud platforms which has so many capabilities to configure and execute the requirements. I understand when the top level people gather they come with various ideas on how to set the goals for the upcoming years and looking at the growing aspects of technology evolution. There are plenty of Open Source tools around, And also there are many Engineers who are capable enough to develop the technological requirements. But the hardest point is which tool suits us the best and which give us a better ROI YoY aspects. Maintaining them and making sure they give us the right results in terms to alerting, Monitoring, Risk factors, Security concerns, which becomes sometimes difficult to sustain when we try to automate them completely as they still require some manual intervention atleast to control the Automated processes. I have been part of many multiple cloud based implementation projects and I have also seen many vendors who promise big aspirations on providing such capabilities have failed miserably were we have lost our Efforts, Time and Money. So eventually we have to come-up with viable solutions with case studies who have implemented this aspirational goals. Strategies fail when the base is poor and unrealistic. "Always stick to basics, Since they are the foundation to every Ladder"