For Crying Out Cloud: Let Coders Code

The whole point of migrating to the cloud is to make organizations more agile and innovative, right? Cloud Infrastructure Managers envision software developers who are free to leverage DevOps, microservices and other cloud resources to accelerate deployment and fuel their company’s digital transformation. They support their efforts by working to enforce security and governance policies to better manage resources, reduce risks and contain costs. However, these same managers may sometimes find that, post-cloud migration, they are now spending excessive time configuring cloud resources, provisioning and keeping up with ever-changing rules.

That means less time for coding and innovation. Increased risk of human error, misconfiguration and delays. And more headaches. For crying out cloud!

The question is how to achieve two objectives that may seem at odds: simplifying cloud consumption for users and enforcing critical security and governance policies. One effective answer is to employ automation with support in the following methodologies:

• A composable self-service catalog. This enables managers to represent infrastructure in code simply by selecting an infrastructure capability as an item in the catalog. Code is reusable, speeding delivery and lowering costs. Using pre-built modules also reduces misconfiguration risk, adds a layer of security and governance and still allows for customization by providing building blocks of pre-built options that can be linked together.
• Policy-driven governance. This enables managers to represent policies in code. They can automatically trigger workflows based on near-time analytics and manage workflows to align with outcomes.

Deliver a service catalog for easy, managed, user provisioning

NTT DATA Nucleus Storefront for Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure’s Service Catalog enables our clients to assemble and offer users a library of service catalog items for cloud provisioning, configuring and de-provisioning. Through highly controlled, self-service, developers can provision cloud resources according to each use case simply by clicking options from a menu of cloud-based stack combinations.

Organizations can configure the service catalog, so the choice of available stack combinations varies from role to role, depending on each coder’s needs, responsibilities and location. Managers can exert further control by mandating a manager to complete an action. Manager approval may not be necessary because a coder’s menu selection triggers a workflow that already contains a chain of permissions, meaning the developers’ choices are essentially pre-approved — taking human error out of the equation and accelerating the process.

Adopting Nucleus means organizations can enforce governance automatically due to policies embedded in each catalog item. This ensures that all provisioning is compliant with the rules established. That means — without any intervention — cloud servers are prevented from being over- or under-provisioned, balancing workloads better, keeping costs under control and making sure appropriate security measures are in place for every new application deployed.

Nucleus provides 100+ pre-built service catalog items, and organizations can create new items to support new vendors and use cases. Once a customized service catalog is in place, managers can reuse items, simplifying the adoption of new use cases and enabling the organization to change vendors without changing existing workflows.

NelsonHall calls it “cognitive and self-healing infrastructure management services”

The value of Nucleus automation is borne out by the NelsonHall 2023 NEAT Report for Cognitive & Self-Healing IT Infrastructure Management. NelsonHall describes “cognitive and self-healing IT infrastructure management services” as those services that use AI, automation, analytics and other capabilities to enable clients to drive operational transformation and deliver value across every business function. The report named NTT DATA a leader in the category based on the performance of the Nucleus platform and its suite of products. Read about the report and Nucleus.

Many organizations are frustrated when their digital transformation aspirations fall short of expectations or the anticipated cost savings of cloud migration fail to fully materialize. This is often attributable to an unplanned-for increase in developer productivity cloud-management issues. With automated provisioning, developers benefit from simpler cloud consumption, giving them more time to focus on innovation. Cloud Infrastructure Managers get a powerful yet flexible way to enforce critical security and governance policies.

Learn more.