LEARNING MADE EASY

VMware Special Edition

IT Automation

Accelerate IT
service delivery

Reduce cost
and risk

Drive business
value

Tracie Stamm
David Zolnier
In the modern digital age, traditional Participants in a VMware customer survey
barriers to entry and time to market have cited three top drivers for automating IT
fallen. Agile businesses can turn an idea into configuration and provisioning:
an app, host it in the cloud, and quickly deliver
•S
 ixty-four percent want to standardize
it to millions of customers on their chosen
repeatable processes. Organizations that
devices and platforms. In comparison,
embrace IT automation will be able to auto-
many larger enterprises miss new business
mate the IT services life cycle to rapidly
opportunities because they’re mired in
configure, provision, test, deploy, migrate,
managing complex, legacy infrastructure,
update, and decommission infrastructure
inefficient cross-functional workflow and
and applications. They can even turn infra-
approval processes, and lengthy audit
structure templates into blueprints that
and compliance requirements.
include networking and security profiles to
create and deliver standardized services no
To successfully compete in this new digital
matter where workloads are deployed.
economy, traditional companies (large and
small) are embracing digital transformation • S
 ixty-three percent seek faster provi-
to drive rapid and fundamental changes in sioning of IT resources. For development
their organizations and operating models. teams, IT automation will shorten release
To enable this seismic shift and stay cycles and enable a much more flexible
relevant, IT organizations must deliver and rapid development process that is
infrastructure and applications with greater not stalled by manual processes and chal-
agility to support business innovation and lenging infrastructure. For IT teams, IT auto-
rapid growth while lowering total cost of mation ensures that they can keep up with
ownership (TCO) and improving operational increased business demand to meet faster
consistency. delivery expectations, while also creating
a culture of business empowerment and
Automation is quickly becoming forward-thinking innovation without the
the key industry standard to traditional risks.
achieve the agility required for
•S
 ixty-three percent want to reduce manual
faster access to IT resources.
configuration to eliminate inconsistencies,
Automation helps organizations
errors, and rework. IT automation enables
accelerate IT service delivery by
greater business agility by eliminating
automating the configuration and
time-consuming manual processes, siloed
provisioning of the networking, security,
workflows, and risky, error-prone tasks for
and infrastructure components that
more consistent delivery and management
support application development.
of IT resources throughout the organization.
Agility by Automation Two Components to Automation
Broaden business agility via effective IT To achieve maximum business agility, your
automation and management to eliminate plan to automate IT should incorporate
manual processes, siloed workflows, and both of the following key components:
risky, error-prone tasks for more consistent •A
 utomate infrastructure. By auto-
delivery and management of IT resources. mating infrastructure, IT teams can
The key technical component provides a free up a significant amount of time to
single control plane across clouds, with deliver innovation and business impact.
access to native cloud APIs that enable Traditional hardware-based infrastruc-
customers to consume native services on ture can be difficult to automate because
any cloud, while also ensuring the ability for it is often
continuous integration, development, and • Complex, due to specialized manual
delivery of their key apps and services. processes necessary to deploy and
operate
Organizations that embrace this strategy • Procedurally slow, which means
will be able to automate the IT services life long lead times to provision IT and
cycle to rapidly configure, provision, test, application resources
deploy, migrate, update, and decommis-
• Inefficient, which leads to unplanned
sion infrastructure and applications.
downtime and wasted capacity
Without automation, IT customers • Noncompliant, which creates
suffer from stagnant, inefficient, security risks with minimal visibility
and time-consuming manual into governance requirements
provisioning processes that result • Difficult (and expensive) to maintain,
in slow resource delivery, unnecessary because it’s often siloed and
manual rework due to error-prone cumbersome to manage
processes, and the inability to scale in the
manner that their organization needs. Automation frees up the time to innovate
by solving the challenges of a traditional
Agility through automation is one of data center. With a software-defined
the most important components in a infrastructure and solutions like VMware
next-generation IT strategy designed to Cloud Foundation, which includes built-in
meet the current and future needs of life-cycle management, organizations can
the business. Without automation, IT will empower an agile, scalable, and highly
struggle to deliver value and keep up with responsive IT organization to deliver the
the demands of the business. innovation and growth that the business
demands. By further integrating cloud The Benefits of VMware Automation
management, IT is able to automate the In a VMware modernized data center,
delivery of composable infrastructure and IT teams can model infrastructure and
app services with self-service capabilities. application resources as “blueprints” with
Self-driving operations deliver continuous embedded automation and policies. This
performance optimization, proactive approach reduces the time it takes to
capacity management, and intelligent provision production-ready infrastructure
troubleshooting and remediation, along and application components from weeks
with costing and usage metering for to minutes and provides a more seamless
infrastructure services across clouds. This alignment of IT to all parts of the
allows IT to run production operations organization.
hands-off and hassle-free across private,
public, and hybrid clouds. This modern approach also streamlines
ongoing management because blueprints
•A
 utomate multi-cloud operations and can be easily managed throughout their
business processes. By introducing new life cycle. VMware’s vRealize Suite enables
levels of automation and operational automation that can give customers
consistency in the cloud and business flexibility and choice, transforming the IT
process areas, IT can ensure that any service life cycle.
decisions made around multi-cloud or
“what’s best for the company” will always Automating IT with VMware solutions helps
be supported with the right data, cost organizations
metrics, and proper use of automation. • R  educe cost and risk, while delivering
Modern organizations increasingly need faster time to value. Next-generation
to be able to leverage multiple clouds predictive analytics and closed-loop
in their next-generation IT plans. This optimization in VMware vRealize
doesn’t necessarily mean that every orga- Operations help automatically balance
nization wants or needs to use multiple workloads, densify infrastructure, reduce
clouds, but rather that the business needs software licensing costs, and optimize
the flexibility to choose the best cloud for performance. Organizations get real-
its upcoming workloads, no matter which time insights to identify capacity risk and
type of cloud or what it may have used potential savings, and automate actions to
in the past. In short, the ability to always assure performance. This highly scalable
provide a choice of cloud has become a and intuitive operations platform helps
business necessity for organizations. predict, prevent, and remediate issues
 across the software-defined data center functionality? Anything as a Service (XaaS)
(SDDC) and multiple clouds with unified is a wizard-driven approach to designing
visibility and 360-degree troubleshooting the end-to-end processes associated with
with metrics and logs. delivering a given IT-business service from
the initial request all the way through auto-
• I ncrease cost visibility. Awareness of mated delivery. These custom services can
costs is a business imperative for multi- be published in the vRealize Automation
cloud operations. One of the important catalog along with other application and
business factors in deciding whether to infrastructure services. The XaaS compo-
place their next workload in a private or nent allows administrators to rapidly
public cloud is cost. To get an accurate deploy new IT business services leveraging
answer, organizations need complete VMware and partner-supplied vRealize
visibility into their hybrid cloud envi- Orchestrator workflows and plugins. XaaS
ronments to understand how much it’s plays a key role in extending automation
costing to run existing IT services, which and repeatable processes to drive the busi-
parts of the organization are consuming ness impact that organizations need from
the resource, and how efficiently those IT a truly forward-thinking IT team.
services are running. This enables IT to
identify opportunities to improve utili- Test-drive IT Automation in a
zation of available resources and reduce Hands-on Lab at www.vmware.
or eliminate wasteful spending. VMware com/go/try-automate-hol.
vRealize Business for Cloud is deeply
Download the following guides from VMware
integrated with vRealize Automation and
to help you start the journey to modernizing
provides the needed cost visibility and
and automating your infrastructure today:
business insight into hybrid IT environ-
ments.

•D
 rive business value by automating any
IT service: VMware solutions like vRealize
Automation provide purpose-built capa-
bilities for automating the delivery and
ongoing management of applications,
desktops, and infrastructure services. But
what if organizations need to deliver addi-
tional business and IT services not covered
by vRealize Automation’s out-of-the-box

For Dummies is a trademark of John WiIey & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 978-1-119-53542-3