Automating the Cloud

Unfortunately, this level of personalization has not spread to enterprise IT departments, which remain stuck in an automation paradigm that resembles the original Henry Ford model. As a result, consumers, i.e., corporate employees, are often in the extreme limited in the type of IT resources they can obtain. To illustrate, developers or business groups that need a new server, even if it's a virtual machine, are given just a couple of options in terms of CPU and RAM, to which they must accommodate their needs and their projects. Until now, during this has been a source of much frustration for users, it has not been a significant business impediment. Nevertheless with more companies expanding their use of virtualization and wanting to adopt cloud computing, it threatens to stifle and even derail enterprise cloud initiatives.

But as democratized manufacturing spreads through our personal lives and virtualization spreads throughout an organization, the configurations that users demand will vary widely, requiring much more individualization than traditional tools are capable of handling. Just in case, the relentless march of desktop and server virtualization in the enterprise will lead to much higher churn in the environment. This means that resources that may have been available or that made financial sense to assign when they were first requested, may no longer be available or feasible when the requests are processed a few hours later. Unfortunately, old-school automation research isn't flexible enough to automatically adjust to real-time data or configure for so many variables. And that means IT staffs will have to spend a lot of time manually intervening to get things as close to right as possible if they want to provide their users with choice.

If you are serious about wanting to adopt cloud computing enterprise-wide and wanting it to be a game-changer for your organization, make sure that your automation solution is designed for scale. Make sure that it doesn't keep you stuck in the cookie-cutter days of yesteryear. You need mass customization automation capabilities in order to drive the flexibility and efficiencies that today's dynamic market demands.

As CTO, Leslie Muller is responsible for DynamicOps' technical strategy and product architecture. Muller has over 18 years of commercial experience as an entrepreneur, developer, chief architect, and executive leader with deep systems management experience and a successful track record in definition and delivery of enterprise software products. Prior to founding DynamicOps, Muller was Senior Technologist at Credit Suisse, responsible for defining IT virtualization strategy and coordinating deployment. Prior to joining Credit Suisse, he founded several successful startup companies including Configuresoft, which provided enterprise configuration management, and SeNTry, which was purchased by NetIQ and is now part of Microsoft's Operation Manager product. Muller is intensely passionate about research and has specialized for the past 10 years in the application of leading-edge technologies to solving complex problems in the enterprise management domain.