A multi-cloud strategy has become the new normal in this age of digital transformation, with research indicating that as many as four out of five companies are choosing this smarter operating model. The survey also reveals that nearly all respondents regard automation as important or very important in operationalising their cutting-edge multi-cloud infrastructure.

Automation is moving higher up the agenda for companies as they seek ways to simplify multi-cloud management and accelerate innovation. Though a multi-cloud approach brings benefits such as the deuced risk of vendor lock-in, better resilience, and tailored services, it increases complexity for the IT team and introduces integration challenges due to the differences between public cloud platforms.

Smarter automated tooling helps to address the barriers enterprises face around people, processes, and systems in a multi-cloud world, including a shortage of skills, siloed operations, and a lack of interoperability. Automation means that the company’s knowledgeable cloud talent can spend less time manually managing a cloud and cloud workloads, freeing their time to innovate and add business value.

Multi-cloud automation solutions simplify administration with centralised tools for managing services spanning multiple private and public clouds. For organisations that leverage containers and Kubernetes, multi-cloud automation enables them to take advantage of the ability to manage, deploy and port applications and services across different cloud environments.

There are several multi-cloud automation use cases and tool categories:

• Infrastructure as code (IaC) enables developers to rapidly add and deploy resources from different clouds. They no longer need to manually provision and manage servers, operating systems, storage, and other infrastructure components every time they develop or deploy an application.

• Automated workload management enables the enterprise to monitor performance and scales the cloud environment. For example, it can add clusters or remove container instances dynamically in response to the performance of an application or infrastructure service.

• Automated deployment can streamline the process of moving a new application release or version from testing and development into production. This is essential to support continuous delivery (CD), continuous integration (CI), and DevOps in a multi-cloud environment.

• FinOps solutions such as cloud cost management and optimisation tools enable automated data collection, enrichment, and verification of enterprise usage, spending, and resource allocation. They also integrate with third-party business applications to simplify managing multi-cloud environments.

The benefits of automation are significant in a multi-cloud environment. Human engineers can focus on higher-value activities that cannot be easily automated instead of spending time on routine tasks. Automation can speed up tasks such as configuring and deploying infrastructure and reduces the opportunity for human error.

It’s arguably essential for any cloud team to manage hundreds of server instances, complex applications, and massive datasets across different clouds. Furthermore, cloud automation and DevOps maturity go hand-in-hand. Cloud automation is key to enabling continuous delivery, tight feedback loops, and repeatability which are the hallmarks of a mature DevOps setup.

Likewise, r cloud financial operations (FinOps) depend on smarter processes and tools to manage cloud spending. Without automation, it will be difficult for the finance and IT team to gain real-time visibility into cloud spending for allocating and benchmarking costs, budgeting, and forecasting.

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