Data centers have grown increasingly complex over the past decade as enterprise IT infrastructures have had to accommodate mobile computing, big data, cloud technology, green initiatives, and more.
As any IT professional knows, complexity creates data center management challenges, especially in a world of tight budgets and minimal staff. Infrastructure problems can go unaddressed as IT workers tend to other responsibilities. By the time outages and access problems are detected and corrected, the damage – including lost productivity and revenue, frustrated employees and customers, etc. – may have already been done.
In a world of high demand for on-demand and real time services, manual solutions to data center challenges just don’t cut it anymore, and automation is the key to staying afloat. Enterprise technology vendors have responded to these growing demands by offering products and services designed to automate IT processes in on-premise data centers as well as cloud deployments.
Automation of infrastructure processes and workloads enables IT professionals to better allocate data center assets and IT resources. IT professionals can deploy automated processes across physical and virtual environments, extending into and including cloud infrastructure services. This makes enterprises more flexible and agile because IT workers can focus on helping to implement strategic initiatives rather than spend hours monitoring server loads, applications performance, and power consumption, or manually provisioning and de-provisioning resources.
An automated data center makes enterprises more competitive because it produces results faster. Today more than ever, the ability to anticipate and serve customer needs as quickly as possible can spell the difference between success and failure.
And the productivity and efficiency benefits of automation extend well beyond the data center. Automation allows the delivery of infrastructure resources to application developers for testing and rollout. It enables end users to access applications on a self-service basis. And it extends financial and portfolio management across multiple clouds and service providers, helping to prevent unexpected overcharging.
Automation also offers enterprises a powerful tool for efficiently capturing, storing and analyzing data – arguably the key to competing in today’s mobile and digital world. Workload automation can instantly connect an enterprise’s data resources and processes, allowing line-of-business leaders and C-level executives to connect the dots faster and execute on informed decisions in a timely fashion.
Data centers are powerful engines that can transform an enterprise’s business – if managed efficiently and effectively. Automation provides IT professionals with a versatile tool that can ensure the delivery of data center services to the right people when they need them, all while freeing up IT resources to work on business goals.
Ready to transform your organization and unleash the power of your data center? Discover how Cisco technologies and Connection’s Data Center Services can help you take advantage of automation today.
