The cloud economy has become as vast as the universe itself, with a myriad of choices available to help run your company efficiently. Those of you using the cloud know how difficult it can sometimes be to decide what, when, and how you should leverage the services provided by many of the cloud providers available – including big names like Amazon, Google, and Oracle.
Cloud services such as Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Software-as-a-service (SaaS), and bare-metal (and private) cloud, as well as the advent of microservices-based architectures and containerisation are just some of the examples of these. These platforms and services provide capabilities that can be leveraged to streamline enterprises and increase their competitive advantage, but they can also bring a lot of complications and challenges.
These choices lead to many deliberating on how to best take advantage of the #cloudeconomy, especially when enterprises are often constrained by legacy processes and technology.
Whatever choices enterprises make, automation is the keystone to empowering and enabling the enterprise to maximise the value of cloud.
What is the Cloud Economy (#cloudeconomy)?
If you’re new to this term, we use it to represent the new worldview on the cloud. We can’t avoid it. Its here. We are living in a #cloudeconomy now. Everyone has a cloud. Most software vendors now have a “cloud” that their software “runs better on”.
Using Different Cloud Services
How are you going to manage all your systems with all these cloud choices available? How do you decide on which ones suit your requirements? They all seem to be offering the same or similar capabilities. They all claim that “their” cloud is better, cheaper, faster, different or more robust. How do you test this without blowing your R&D budget just to prove it.
You may want to run some applications on-premise, but what happens if you’re locked into a proprietary cloud service on Google? It means you won’t be able to use a similar service on Amazon without potentially extensive re-development work to move it to another platform.
Enterprises like yours aren’t going to place all their eggs in one basket. The reality is, to stay competitive, you have no choice but to consume different cloud services from a myriad of providers. So, what about your operating model? How are you going to run these disparate systems across different cloud providers? You will need to give thought about how you will run and manage your platforms in this #cloudeconomy.
You’re going to need tools that help you deploy and manage your applications without complications.
Enterprise Software is Dead!
An emotive statement yes, but one that certainly has an element of truth to it. Enterprise software as we know it (or knew it), is dead. The “subscription-as-a-service” driven economy is becoming the norm. Enterprise software solutions are commonly delivered to the cloud first. Heterogeneous and hybrid cloud platforms are the norm.
Enterprise need to deliver value at speed
Enterprises are striving to deliver value (and outcomes) to their businesses, and deliver value (and outcomes) at speed. Initiatives such as those surrounding digital transformation, API, and operating models are common and all strive to deliver value to their corresponding organisations, enabling them to retain, obtain, and gain market advantages.
So how are Enterprise successful in this #cloudeconomy?
They adopt software engineering as a core competency. Automation, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Agile software engineering practices are key capabilities empowering and enabling enterprises to take advantage of the #cloudeconomy.
No longer are these companies limited to being just a bank, a telco, or an insurance company. Now they’ve evolved to a software engineering house, adopting and championing software engineering capabilities to deliver value at speed.
So how do enterprises become empowered in this new worldview?
Freedom of Choice
Enterprises want the freedom to choose what to run, when to run it, and how to run it. They also want to understand the value and ROI when using these cloud platforms. Operational tooling and processes are critical to maximising the value of using many disparate cloud platforms and services. One process – many clouds. Enterprises should strive to operate their systems and services the same way, regardless of which cloud or platform they are hosted on.
Introducing LimePoint
At LimePoint, automation is at our core. Our products are designed and developed to empower enterprises in the #cloudeconomy.
Extensible Automation Platform
Our extensible automation platform (MintPress) allows your enterprise to deliver the value of speed. You can best describe it as your DevOps best practices in a box.
Continuous Configuration Monitoring
Configurations are always complex, especially with cloud services. It’s better to have a continuous monitoring system to avoid any overlooked mistakes. Without knowing what was changed, your app deployments could prove disastrous. Trying to scope out an error could take days, leading to downtime for your applications and a possible lost user base. DriftGuard lets you detect, fix, or prevent configuration drift and allows you to monitor what was changed at all times. Now your enterprise can give you more thorough insights into all your system operations.
Application Packaging and Deployment
MintPress allows you to automate the compilation and packaging of your applications from source code to deploy these across your entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Service Catalog
Our MintPress Service Catalog lets you define your consumable catalog items. You can manage your catalog items as applications, microservices, or technology assets across your platforms and environments, supporting complete lifecycle management of your catalog items – from provisioning to management and finally to decommissioning.
Platform Agnostic
Both MintPress and DriftGuard are platform agnostic, enabling your to automate and manage your systems across many different cloud providers. Don’t like to run your systems on Google anymore – no problem! Build and deploy them on Amazon instead, at the click of a button.
We invite you to stay tuned for our next blog in this new series where we explore how we can empower your enterprise using our products and services.
Contact us at LimePoint to learn more about our automation platform features.
