“Enterprises need optimized hybrid cloud architecture to meet the demands of digital transformation as well as automation tools to optimize the hybrid cloud,” says David Coulter, Chief Technology Officer, Cloudbolt in an exclusive hot seat interview with EnterpriseTalk
ET Bureau: Do regulations and compliance create roadblocks for digital transformation?
David Coulter: Absolutely. Compliance can be restrictive, particularly when enterprises are using automation in industries and situations that are heavily regulated by laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, and many others.
The infrastructure automation necessary for successful digital transformation creates risks for human error, non-compliant deployments, and configuration drift that leads to compliance lapses.
Traditional infrastructure automation tools rely on customized and un-supported integration methods, such as plug-ins, workflows, and third-party content that are error-prone, frequently modified, un-managed, and ungoverned.
These integration methods are not re-usable or consumable across different toolsets, resulting in a proliferation of non-compliant automation services across an organization. Identifying these services, applying organizational policies and enforcing compliance becomes impossible.
Therefore, organizations end up with a number of integrations that do not meet organizational standards, resulting in compliance breaches, vulnerabilities, and outages that are costly and difficult to correct.
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ET Bureau: How does the OneFuse 1.1 platform simplify the complexity of cloud management for IT professionals?
David Coulter: OneFuse 1.1 simplifies hybrid cloud management by enabling IT to seamlessly integrate automation tools and platforms without writing custom code. With OneFuse, IT can centralize and standardize integrations, creating policy-driven services that can be safely consumed by other systems and teams.
In addition, OneFuse manages and tracks integration use, improving visibility and significantly reducing the security and compliance risks that come from integrating automation tools across a hybrid cloud environment.
With OneFuse 1.1, organizations can define policies from a single web-based panel, ensuring monitoring, compliance, security, auditing, and logging requirements for multiple vendor services and components are met.
They can easily see what, when and how services and resources are being used and who is using them. A full audit trail of all requests, job outcomes, users, and policies is always available at the click of a button.
OneFuse 1.1 also provides robust role-based access control (RBAC), so IT teams can easily limit who can create and execute policies while securely segmenting and managing policies within and across departments.
ET Bureau: Why should enterprises opt for OneFuse 1.1 custom integration software over traditional custom coding for infrastructure automation tools?
David Coulter: There are many reasons why eliminating the need to custom-code integrations will make enterprise leaders’ lives easier.
First of all, custom-coding integration takes a lot of time, money and resources. If they need to integrate automation tools such as VMware vRealize, Kubernetes, Ansible, or Terraform, either an enterprise’s team or–more likely–expensive third-party consultants have to write or maintain thousands of lines of code.
This could take months and cost millions of dollars over time. In fact, a Standish Group study reported that half of all custom code projects end up costing double their original estimate, and a fifth of them never even get finished.
Second, the chore of custom coding is never finished. Suppose enterprise leaders want to adopt a multi-tool approach and stay agile, as any successful enterprise does. In that case, the custom code will constantly have to be updated to integrate new tools, stay on top of new security threats and maintain compliance.
Furthermore, when the infrastructure of an enterprise is cluttered with endless spaghetti code, enterprise leaders can’t have a 360-degree unified view of all of the integrations and configurations. As mentioned earlier, a single view from a centralized console is key to simplifying cloud management.
But how can an enterprise achieve that when troubleshooting and auditing integrations require combing through multiple systems logs and code lines?
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Why shouldn’t enterprises integrate automation tools with simple configurations through a middleware abstraction layer that already has dynamic, manageable, API-addressable integrations built-in? It’s a no-brainer.
ET Bureau: What trends do you think will transform the hybrid cloud environment in the coming years?
David Coulter: For some time now, there’s a saying in the enterprise market that the single biggest shift in the cloud management paradigm will be the role of integration because it really is a cornerstone to advancing automation.
Until now, the core capabilities of cloud management platforms have been automation and orchestration, with integration being more of an afterthought. Most CMPs ignore the integration challenges inherent to cloud management, but this limits the extent to which processes can be automated and locks companies into suboptimal operating models.
Enterprises strongly believe that the integration layer will soon become an equal pillar of cloud management, as critical and important as automation and orchestration. It’s just not feasible for them to continue having to write custom code every time they want to add a new automation tool to their infrastructure.
Enterprises need optimized hybrid cloud architecture to meet the demands of digital transformation as well as automation tools to optimize the hybrid cloud. But the more they have to custom code, the less likely they’ll be able to achieve the full promise of automation. They won’t have the visibility, governance and agility they need to stay competitive and spending a lot of time and money.
When it comes to integrations, there are more chances that the future is codeless. That’s not just a trend, but a paradigm shift.
David Coulter works as one of CloudBolt’s Chief Technology Officers. Joining CloudBolt through the SovLabs acquisition, David focuses on product integration and leads the OneFuse product line. David brings over 20 years of technology experience and leadership in customer, partner and software vendor roles across systems architecture, operations, software development and product management, focusing on fortune 500 enterprise and service provider customers. David holds numerous industry certifications, including VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX #72) and speaks at automation-focused events, including VMUG and VMworld.
Vishal Muktewar is a Senior Correspondent at On Dot Media. He reports news that focuses on the latest trends and innovations happening in the B2B industry. An IT engineer by profession, Vishal has worked at Insights Success before joining Ondot. His love for stories has driven him to take up a career in enterprise journalism. He effectively uses his knowledge of technology and flair for writing, for crafting features, articles and interactions for technology enterprise media platforms.
