How can we simplify and accelerate the administration of server management tools (e.g., back-up, anti-virus and analytics) across both private and public infrastructure like AWS or Azure? Let’s take a look.
The Problem
Today, all organizations are migrating workloads and applications to the cloud and public infrastructure. In terms of economics and efficiency, it makes a lot of sense.
- Servers can be easily created, wired together, and torn down
- Technologies can be switched-out more easily than before
- Many application components can be consumed as a service
- Over-provisioning of resources to meet future scale projections in no longer necessary
There are many steps to migrate workloads to the cloud. I want to discuss the challenges specific to administration of server management tools (e.g., back-up, security, analytics or monitoring) that need to be deployed across both private and public infrastructure.
- The server management tools deployed for physical or virtual machines that are on-premise are not necessarily the right ones for the public cloud.
- The ways these tools are often provisioned on-premise (with templates, scripts or open tickets that require manual work by silo-ed IT teams), just doesn’t scale to meet the magnitude and speed requirements of public infrastructure deployments. These approaches are often too slow, too cumbersome and too prone to manual error.
Managing On-Prem and Cloud Environments
As IT operations teams adopt separate tools to administer public cloud infrastructure (and educate their enterprise IT users how to use them), overall complexity for IT actually increases. Delivering services across both public and private infrastructure often causes IT teams to create additional and separate processes to administer new public server tools.
Adding any complexity to IT operations is a step backwards. And it removes much of the value expected from moving workloads to the public cloud. The need to support hybrid application deployment, (e.g. with the staging area on-premise and the production are in the cloud), further complicates things.
Meanwhile, IT application owners need a quick, effortless way to take care of server management concerns across these different environments. If application owners are not satisfied with processes provided by IT operations teams, they may simply go their own way and create their own “shadow IT” capabilities that avoid their organizations’ formal IT groups and their (perceived to be) too slow and too cumbersome processes. But, when application owners’ side-step formal IT teams they also side-step standards for security and business continuity that IT provides. These application owners are leaving the enterprise vulnerable to various risks such as application failures, data leaks, security breaches, and an array of legal liabilities when their public infrastructure computing solutions do not comply with company or regulatory standards. All this can be avoided if application owners receive cloud-scale service levels from their own enterprise IT.
The Solution
So what’s the solution? Or, put another way, how can IT use Cloud migration initiatives as an opportunity to streamline and modernize server management capabilities across hybrid infrastructure?
The solution lies in centralized, automated provisioning and lifecycle control of all server management tools – both on-premise and in the public cloud – through a unified platform that can be viewed by operations teams, infrastructure teams, executives and app owners alike.
Once shared and role-based visibility is achieved, the next step is to provide IT operations teams with a mechanism to efficiently provide management services with the click of a button, across all on-premise, hosted and cloud environments. Next, operators need the ability to define rules and policies governing deployment and configuration of different server management tools according to considerations such as:
- the stage of the application lifecycle (development, testing, staging, production)
- the geographical/cloud location where the application is being deployed
- the management requirements of specific applications, and
- the regulatory requirements for specific applications
Ideally, we would like to have tools that can be easily decoupled from the services they provide. This allows operations teams to continuously evaluate new management tools and services and to deliver them to existing and new workloads.
Such a centralized yet flexible approach can also allow IT teams to leave it to business users to define some of their IT management needs and SLAs through a service catalog – and have these needs addressed quickly and automatically. Management tools and services can now be provided to business users in an efficient self-service manner, just like they’ve provisioned everything else in the public cloud.
The Value of Jetpatch
Jetpatch’s out of the box software provides organizations with that previously elusive centralized view and control of server management tools – for both on-premise and cloud-based tools. With Jetpatch, your entire app environment is visible and defined role-based actions are available to the various stakeholders through a service catalog for IT operations..
The Jetpatch solution is simple. It automates centralized deployment, configuration, upgrade, roll-back, and/or decommission of any server management tool, in any IT environment, and ensures the standardized, correct and stable state of all tools throughout their lifetime. Policy-driven automation delivers consistent tool-set management capabilities and enhances the relationship between operations teams and end-users. The results? Now IT can:
- Deliver IT services more quickly, by automating the deployment and “Day 2” management of server tools across physical and virtual machines, both on premises and in the cloud
- Minimize downtime and ensure business service delivery by automating real-time tool health monitoring and remediation across all servers
- Reduce IT Operations’ workload by using a single platform that simplifies control and compliance of all server management software across thousands of servers throughout their lifecycle
This helps to simplify, accelerate and modernize the management of enterprise IT tools and services.
Next Steps: Check out the Whitepaper: The New As-A-Service Model for Systems Management: Why it’s Needed and How it Works. Learn how you can transform siloed, manually-intensive tools and processes into an automated, unified set of systems management services – with no changes required to any tool.
