Cloud migrations are hard and risky. It’s difficult to know how to move all the systems that run your business without causing unplanned disruption or outages. Unraveling this complexity to identify application dependencies and map assets that must move together is just the start. There are compliance, security and other governance requirements to consider, as well as SLAs and RTO/RPO objectives that need to be met.
Although IT is replete with teams and tools to manage these requirements, none of these tools were designed to work together. So it’s no surprise that as organizations accelerate their migration to the cloud, they face challenges. Despite having a burgeoning set of native and partner tools from each cloud platform provider, those tools don’t work together to help them plan, orchestrate and execute a migration end-to-end.
Across all areas of IT, platforms have emerged as the way to address these challenges. A platform unifies both the multitude of teams and tools involved in specific projects, drives collaboration, and helps to mitigate risk by serving as a single source of information.
Virtually anyone can spin up a new cloud environment, test SaaS offerings and move assets to the cloud – but not everyone has access to the same critical data about each application to know if it can run in a specific geo or if it accesses personal data, or which other systems it accesses.
In fact in its 2021 State of Observability report, VMware noted that 86% of engineers surveyed reported that cloud applications were significantly more complex than just five years ago. Teams used multiple microservices frameworks, apps requests often spanned many third party APis and technologies, code deployments had become more frequent and test periods were shortened, and vendors had different approaches to app security.
Platforms help solve this problem. They help teams work together better, with access to the same data across all phases of a project. In doing so, they find gaps – and fill gaps. They introduce more complete, scalable levels of automation to such common processes as:
And leveraging a platform for orchestration makes automation even more powerful by coordinating human and automated tasks with precision, and executing complex workflows at scale.
When software distribution switched from physical to digital, developers and ops teams still functioned separately. Operating as silos with different goals, objectives and KPIs, led to many less-than-stellar releases and less-than-satisfied customers. Development teams automated discrete steps in their process to accelerate their ability to deliver new releases, but the steps were still discrete.
DevOps emerged as a way to seamlessly build and support software. It orchestrated and unified the development and operational distribution and support of software. And today, DevSecOps is rapidly expanding to meet the top concerns of IT leaders by building security, compliance and other requirements into the development process and into the operation of runtime platforms as an end-to-end approach.
Orchestration platforms are an extra connectivity layer on top of all your applications, systems, and infrastructure and are built to automate interactions between them. They act as connectors, helping you build a series of streamlined, repeatable, and cost-effective processes that run on autopilot. And the automation built into these platforms results in productivity and efficiency gains, which means cost reductions and faster results.
When teams use a single platform they can take a holistic view of their project. Rather than using discrete tools to individually track spend, identify security vulnerabilities, and manage governance, an orchestration platform enables teams to assess and evaluate these areas – and more – in relation to each other. And this leads to better decision making, better planning, and improves the likelihood of delivering expected business outcomes.
So, perhaps now more than ever, it is the time to ask some key questions:
Watch this video and you may get inspired to learn more about how your team can achieve digital success with efficiency and lower risk.