A recent industry study predicted that 70 percent of organisations will implement infrastructure automation by 2025. What is the driver behind this?
The driver for automation is twofold – the industry is moving to hybrid cloud which increases the complexity for deployment and as software continues to be the primary differentiator for all companies, security of deployments is paramount.
What does ‘infrastructure as code’ means? Why does this matter?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes. With IaC, configuration files are created that contain your infrastructure specifications, which makes it easier to edit and distribute configurations. It also ensures that you provision the same environment every time. By codifying and documenting your configuration specifications, IaC aids configuration management and helps you to avoid undocumented, ad-hoc configuration changes.
Automating infrastructure provisioning with IaC means that developers don’t need to manually provision and manage servers, operating systems, storage, and other infrastructure components each time they develop or deploy an application.
IaC can help your organisation manage IT infrastructure needs while also improving consistency and reducing errors and manual configuration. Benefits include cost reduction, increase in speed of deployments, reduce errors. improve infrastructure consistency and eliminate configuration drift.
How can enterprises scale their automation capabilities? What aspects should they keep in mind?
A solid automation strategy can help you innovate faster, increase IT productivity and efficiency, and reduce costs. Getting started on the right path means learning about the technology itself and aligning your teams and culture to support your organisation’s business goals.
To support the cultural shift to an automation-centric strategy, organisations are adopting Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to operational efficiency for DevOps teams. When enterprises begin the process of automation, we always suggest starting with the most mundane/task oriented things first. This allows the system administrators to quickly become familiar with the benefits of automation, and provides them more time to focus on more complex assignments. Red Hat Ansible, which uses a readable YAML playbook, was designed with simplicity in mind and given the examples and massive community allows administrators to get up and running quickly, often within an hour, automating their first task.
The next level is for teams to work together to automate, moving to the organisation, and sharing playbooks with a provided centralised company private hub. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is for experienced Ansible automation engineers, DevOps practitioners, and Linux system administrators seeking to deploy, control, and support centralised automation execution on a large scale.
What key factors are hindering the success of automation within organisations?
When it comes to your challenges, one size does not fit all. It’s difficult to scale organisational frameworks to affect meaningful change. Combined with key technologies, open practices can break down organisational barriers, augment or migrate away from legacy systems or reduce technical debt, among other goals.
Solutions such as the Ansible Automation Platform provides an enterprise framework for building and operating IT automation at scale, from hybrid cloud to the edge. It enables users across an organisation to create, share, and manage automation—from development and operations to security and network teams. It delivers open source innovation, hardened for enterprises – so it can boost productivity and reduce time-to-completion for new projects. It provides a more secure and stable foundation for deploying end-to-end automation.
As enterprise automation becomes more prevalent, how can organisations ensure the security of their environments?Â
As your infrastructure evolves and grows more complex, it gets harder to keep everything secure. Organisations need to leverage an automation platform that is integrated with security functions and software vendor solutions, that automates security processes and maintains consistency and compliance.
They should also choose a platform that’s equipped with the capabilities to coordinate enterprise security and compliance systems, including:
- Investigation: Collect logs across firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and other security systems to support triage activities by security information and event management systems (SIEMs).
- Threat detection: Automatically tune the level of logging and create new IDS rules and new firewall policies to detect threats in less time.
- Incident response: Speed actions like denylisting or allowlisting IP addresses, domains, or traffic and quickly isolate suspicious workloads for further investigation.
