Reasons Cloud Orchestration is becoming a must-have for businesses

The flexible and scalable resource allocation is a core feature of modern cloud providers allowing enterprises to scale up their compute and storage resources as needed. However, this burdens the IT departments with the task of deploying and managing a growing number of applications and secure workflows across multiple cloud environments. Businesses are, therefore, increasingly turning to cloud orchestration to solve this problem and manage the myriad dependencies across multiple clouds, with policy-driven security and management capabilities.

Cloud orchestration is the end-to-end automation of the deployment of services in a cloud environment. It ties together several automation processes into a cohesive and unified system to manage the core infrastructure and workflows across a cloud environment. Note that orchestration is a superset of automation. While automation enables one task to be repeated quickly with little manual intervention, cloud orchestration goes beyond that to provide coordination between multiple automated tasks, thereby accelerating the delivery of IT services.

In the current economic scenario, organizations are building new digital infrastructure and setting up cloud resources to make a smoother transition into the digital age. In this scenario, cloud applications have become the new currency, making cloud orchestration a necessity. Incidentally, during the pandemic, cloud orchestration and automation helped eliminate the dependency on staff availability, thus supporting both remote working and ensuring business resilience.

Benefits of Cloud Orchestration

Apart from providing business agility, cloud orchestration help sustain competitive advantage and an efficient customer experience. It allows large enterprises to enable a hybrid cloud framework, manage their cloud infrastructure, and provision resources aligned with the changing business conditions.

Narsimha Rao Mannepalli, Executive VP, Head - Cloud Infrastructure and Security Solutions and Head - Infosys Validation Solutions, Infosys

Managing service across a multi-cloud environment is a daunting task, both from provisioning as well as an operational perspective. Cloud orchestration enables self-service provisioning of services without the need for IT intervention allowing enterprises to reduce manual errors and the need for IT staff. It does the entire provisioning automatically. From the process orchestration, curation of services offered by different cloud providers, to approvals and budget allocation – followed by the technical orchestration of provisioning of the selected services in the cloud.

Cloud orchestration brings operational efficiency with quicker provisioning of the environment along with faster application deployment and time to market. It also improves the self-healing capability of applications and platform availability by being sentient and automating incident detection and remediation.

Cloud orchestration proves very useful in establishing the initial total cost of ownership basis a comparison between different offerings as well as account for real-time changes in the costs which allow organizations to take steps to optimize costs. It empowers IT departments across the board. Developers can use cloud orchestration for environment provisioning. Public cloud requires puttering with multiple factors, including pricing, and availability. Cloud orchestration abstracts these complicated aspects and gives a simplified view with appropriate recommendations powered by AI and ML. The business users on the other hand can use it for monitoring usage, costs, and the performance of deployed applications. Lastly, the operations team can use cloud orchestration from a monitoring and management perspective to bring in operational efficiency.

Summary

Cloud orchestration is a relatively new category of tools designed to help organizations manage applications, processes, and services in increasingly complex cloud environments. It is essentially a layer that abstracts this complexity and helps eliminate islands of automation in favor of a wider, cohesive approach. The global enterprise cloud ecosystem is fragmented and ripe for orchestration. Cloud orchestration services are set to act as a force multiplier for the cloud-powered business transformation of enterprises.

Author: Narsimha Rao Mannepalli, Executive VP, Head - Cloud Infrastructure and Security Solutions and Head - Infosys Validation Solutions, Infosys