How to Unleash the Power of Cloud Automation

Many organizations take a “wait and see” approach with their infrastructure. They wait for something to break, and then they fix it.

But this reactive approach leads to inefficiencies, higher costs, security gaps, and more frequent breakdowns.

The older your IT environment, the more likely you’ll experience failures. According to IDC, an IT solution’s performance drops by 22% in its third year and 59% by its seventh year. And running your equipment to failure costs three to ten times more than regular maintenance. These expenses stem from pricy, last-minute repairs that you didn’t plan for in your budget.

5 Cloud Migration and Automation Best Practices 

Migrating your infrastructure to the cloud helps you eliminate exorbitant, on-premises maintenance costs while you gain a highly available and reliable environment that creates business value. And adding automation to the mix can help you see value from the cloud even faster.

Here are five best practices that will help you succeed when migrating your infrastructure to the cloud:

1. Don’t move your junk.

Before you move to a new house, you’ll likely sort your stuff and get rid of things you no longer need. This allows you to avoid the time and costs of packing, moving, and unpacking junk.

It’s the same when you migrate to the cloud. Lifting and shifting everything may seem like the fastest path to the cloud, but moving everything as is will increase your migration complexities and costs. According to Bain & Co., more than 80% of enterprise workloads are overprovisioned. Moving this excess capacity to the cloud increases the costs of running workloads by 15%, despite offloading computing and storage expenses to your cloud provider.^[i] 

If you don’t clean your data in advance, you may also need to perform a second migration in the near future. Going back and doing everything again will allow you to clean your data, move it to new databases, and make it usable in the public cloud.  

Minimizing your infrastructure, applications, and data before you migrate will streamline your migration, keep your costs in check, and make your new environment more efficient.

2. Standardize your automation platform.

94% of enterprise business users would prefer integrating their applications and building workflow automations on a unified platform instead of relying on several systems.^[ii]

The more automation tools you use, the harder it is to track and manage everything. Platforms have different data formats, interfaces, and integration capabilities—making it hard for business units and applications to share data. Employees may need to transfer data between systems using inefficient and error-prone manual processes.

Standardizing your automation with the Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform will give you interoperability across your data centers, private clouds, and public clouds. The platform is available through the AWS Marketplace and includes everything you need to build, deploy, secure, and manage end-to-end automation in a hybrid cloud environment.

3. Look for a platform-agnostic solution.

If you have a hybrid cloud environment, you need an automation platform that spans all your networks, applications, and services—whether they are located on-premises or in the cloud. A flexible automation platform will help all your legacy and cloud systems work together better. 

The Ansible Automation Platform is hardware- and environment-agnostic. It runs on everything and includes all the tools you need to automate your enterprise from end to end. You also don’t need other Red Hat technologies to use it.

4. Perform a MAP assessment before an AWS migration.

If you are migrating your infrastructure to AWS, you may want to take advantage of its Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).

SoftwareOne and AWS can put a plan together to fully migrate your environment and make the transition as smooth as possible. The three-step program starts with a migration readiness assessment that helps you identify your gaps. Then, the mobilization phase addresses your gaps and helps you build an operational foundation for your migration. Finally, you will migrate your workloads and modernize them in AWS. 

The comprehensive cloud migration program has helped organizations achieve the following results:

• 69% reduction in unplanned downtime
• 62% more efficient IT infrastructure management
• 31% lower infrastructure costs^[iii]

5. Find an experienced cloud migration partner.

The right partner can accelerate your migration and help you drive rapid value from the cloud. Look for a partner or reseller who will meet you where you are in your cloud journey—whether you’re ready to go all-in on the public cloud or prefer a hybrid model.

Your partner should also have a proven track record of helping organizations succeed with the Ansible Automation Platform. They should deeply understand the platform’s capabilities, best practices, and how to integrate it into your infrastructure effectively.

 

1. The older your IT environment, the more likely you’ll experience failures. According to IDC, an IT solution’s performance drops by 22% in its third year and 59% by its seventh year.1
2. And running your equipment to failure costs three to ten times more than regular maintenance. 2
3. Moving this excess capacity to the cloud increases the costs of running workloads by 15%, despite offloading computing and storage expenses to your cloud provider.3
4. 94% of enterprise business users would prefer integrating their applications and building workflow automations on a unified platform instead of relying on several systems.4
5. 31% lower infrastructure costs 5

1. IDC, 2015
2. Buildings.com: Stop Wasting Money on Deferred Maintenance, 2018
3. Wall Street Journal: Lift-and-Shift Cloud Strategies Can Be Costly, 2018
4. Workato: 18 business automation statistics, 2023
5. AWS: AWS Migration Acceleration Program, 2023