The next five years will drive more change in the world of hybrid cloud automation. The future of hybrid cloud automation is, to be sure, furiously contested. Indeed, 'cloud' in cloud computing is used appropriately as the technology is ever-changing and re-arranging similar to the winds and also the currents that guide clouds in the sky. Similarly, the technology business needs to re-arrange in terms of how to leverage the cloud to achieve a competitive edge.

Demand Trends

The hybrid cloud strategy incorporates a mix of public, private, and on-site cloud. It enables IT teams to select the right virtual infrastructure for each use case in today’s businesses. This offers new opportunities to enhance agility, heterogeneity, and scalability while taking advantage of the prevailing management investment.

According to a study, at present, 32% of IT infrastructure and application workloads are hosted on the hybrid-cloud setup and are likely to increase to 45% by 2020. More interestingly, 55% of the respondents stated that they would like to invest in hybrid cloud for new applications. Most enterprises expressed their interest in moving to the Internet of Things (IoT), application environments, big data/analytics and other related workloads to hybrid cloud by 2020. This has led to a drastic reduction in non-cloud workloads. Similarly, 70% organizations have a clear understanding of the costs involved in application development, migration, and administration along with the roles, policies, responsibility, governance, and ownership of cloud computing. In the present scenario, cloud computing has moved from buzzword to mainstream business.

According to a study, 32% of IT infrastructure and application workloads are currently hosted on the hybrid cloud setup and are likely to increase to 45% by 2020.

A leading research shows that there will be a massive shift from traditional data centers to hybrid IT paradigms due to the continued growth of cloud computing and industrialized services alongside a decline in traditional data center outsourcing. The research forecast is that by the end of this decade, 90% of the businesses will be able to manage their hybrid infrastructure.

HCL’s Perspective on Hybrid Cloud Automation

HCL Technologies is dedicated to providing solutions for industry-level problems using next-gen artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive vision techniques with seamless integration with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Several unstructured tasks and complex automation requires cognitive skills and rule-based automation to achieve structured tasks through RPA. This enables end-to-end enterprise automation as a part of our cognitive automation under the umbrella of DRYiCE initiatives.

• Maintenance of IT Automation: One of the key advantages of automation is that it improves the maintenance and reliability of complex IT systems. Whether it is transportation, manufacturing or data-driven industries such as finance and healthcare, automated management capabilities can optimize performance. However, considering IT automation as a solution for all the issues isn’t probably a great deal. This is the reason why effective automation needs the following key technologies:
  • Cognitive Analytics: By empowering management systems to forecast potential hassle areas in complicated systems, enterprises can prevent unfortunate events. In addition, they can maximize uptime and provide enhancements in performance, safety, and other factors.
  • Real-time Pattern Recognition: Old-fashioned maintenance techniques consider the raw figure that supports past records and broad assumptions on materials and component life cycles. With data constantly flooding into analytics engines describing what's happening at any given moment of operation, machine-driven systems gain a better state of awareness of system health.
  • Dynamic Automation: A dynamic system can take corrective actions on its own, instead of waiting for instructions to be entered manually. This might involve the removal of a failing component from service, shifting loads to nearby elements, or alerting maintenance teams long before a failure happens.
• Convergence of RPA Tools: Enterprises continue to use legacy systems due to various reasons starting from strategic to those being client/vendor inherited or preferred from mergers and acquisitions or simply due to high-migration cost. RPA-on-cloud merely takes technology to the next level by bringing all legacy systems to the same platform as ERPs and plays the role of a leveler. Although cloud computing is looked at with some mistrust, the risks can easily be mitigated by deploying advanced technologies available in the market today.
• Intelligent Hybrid cloud Automation: The cognitive engine itself must be capable of learning all aspects of hybrid cloud infrastructure management. This enables it to make strategic autonomous decisions regarding systems and client support. This is crucial because data environments will soon become too large and complex for manual, human-guided oversight.

Bring in Solutions Aligned to Opportunities

Enterprises encounter vital challenges while implementing hybrid cloud automation — enough to surprise if the ends justify the means. IT automation offers several advantages to customer-facing and back-office processes and likewise to product and services. However, the question is, can these advantages lower prices, increase profit, or boost higher outcomes?

Our IT automation teams are working toward building a robust hybrid cloud monitoring framework that ensures solid application performance, high availability, and low costs across different infrastructures. Additionally, we are also developing monitoring tools, which will aggregate data about different infrastructure components, such as compute, storage, and network. Automation plays a significant role in hybrid cloud monitoring. It reduces false negatives and positives, improves data collection, and dynamically scales infrastructures. Even from today’s vantage point, it’s evident that the continued adoption of automation will modernize enterprise operations and improve the competitive positions of businesses as they head toward a service-based economy. The key is to understand how to implement and use IT automation strategically in our data centers.

To achieve the desired level of IT automation, HCL provides hybrid cloud automation solutions to enterprises, including cutting-edge tools and advanced cognitive and RPA solutions. This helps streamline operations in their software-defined data centers. Finally, enterprises will need to adopt a service integration model that provides the flexibility to compose modular services from multiple providers. This is often, the only effective way to shift both infrastructure and operations to meet rapidly evolving business needs on a global scale.

In the modern digital era, trust is everything.  Organizations that can maintain reliable service while providing new options and ways of accomplishing tasks will find themselves at the top of customer retention and loyalty metrics. This is applicable whether the service being offered depends on physical, virtual, or cloud-based infrastructure. Remember that downtime results in dissatisfaction. In this new world, hybrid cloud automation supported by cognitive intelligence is needed for enterprises. The intent is exclusively not to thrive but survive to become a run-of-the-mill inside a distributed data ecosystem.

In this new world, hybrid cloud automation supported by cognitive intelligence is needed for enterprises.