Cloud & Automation Assessment
Automation assessment and strategy development
You know where you need to go, but you can’t allocate the internal resources to evaluate your current state, or you don’t have the expertise to develop a full automation and private cloud roadmap. Our automation assessment will answer the basic questions of “Where do I start?”, “What problems can I solve?” and “What is the business case?”. Our assessment methodology will, at minimal cost and internal resource commitment, quickly assess readiness for automation, identify quick wins, and help you plan a roadmap for data center automation and private cloud on your way to the lights out data center.
You know where you need to go, but you can’t allocate the internal resources to evaluate your current state, or you don’t have the expertise to develop a full automation and private cloud roadmap. Our automation assessment will answer the basic questions of “Where do I start?”, “What problems can I solve?” and “What is the business case?”. Our assessment methodology will, at minimal cost and internal resource commitment, quickly assess readiness for automation, identify quick wins, and help you plan a roadmap for data center automation and private cloud on your way to the lights out data center.
Here are the steps we follow:
- Process overview – This is a comprehensive review of how development, stage/test, and production environments are managed inside your organization. Processes range from initial business request through approval, accounting, provisioning/deployment, governance, compliance and retirement.
- Environment overview – This includes review of some or all (depending on size and complexity) of the tools used in the infrastructure, including top applications developed/deployed, server configurations, operating systems (versions, patch revs, kernel configurations), storage infrastructure, databases.
- Develop Goals/Objectives – After our process and environment overviews, we will sit down with executive management and develop automation goals that are realistic, achievable and cost effective. This will include short, medium and long term goals. These may be as straightforward as automation of password reset, integration of systems that are currently being done manually, or more advanced goals, such as cataloging pre-designed configurations for the app dev group, and completely automating the provisioning and governance of development environments, so when they are no longer used, they are automatically archived and computing resources freed up per predefined policy. Goals can also include complete environment lifecycle management for dev, stage/test and production.
- Strategy and Roadmap – After we agree on goals and objectives, we will help you plan out how to accomplish those with a short, medium and long term strategy and plan. The end result will be that you will have the knowledge, understanding, strategy and plan to reduce IT operational cost and increase quality of service, know the investment required and the return on that investment.
