Part 2 of WEI’s Cloud Security Foundations series. You can find part 1 here.

Setting up a secure AWS environment is a critical step for any organization looking to leverage the cloud effectively. However, without a solid security foundation, even the most advanced deployments can be vulnerable to costly misconfigurations and breaches. 

According to recent industry reports, 80% of cloud security incidents stem from misconfigurations that could have been prevented with proper foundational controls. In the second edition of the three-part Cloud Security Foundation Series, we’ll walk you through a practical, five-phase roadmap to help you build and maintain a strong security posture in AWS from day one. To read revisit part one, click here. 

Why Automation Matters: The Scale Challenge 

Managing security across 5 AWS accounts manually? Challenging but doable. Managing security across 50+ accounts manually? Nearly impossible. 

This is where AWS Control Tower and Organizations become game-changers. They transform security from a manual, error-prone process into an automated, scalable system that grows with your organization. 

The Foundation: AWS Organizations + Control Tower Automation 

Before diving into the phases, let’s discuss the automation backbone that enables everything else to be possible. AWS Control Tower is essentially an orchestration layer that sits on top of AWS Organizations, automating the setup and governance of your multi-account environment. Think of it as your security automation command center. 

Why This Matters for Cybersecurity 

AWS Organizations provides the basic multi-account structure and consolidated billing. Still, AWS Control Tower builds upon this by offering pre-configured security blueprints, service control policies (SCPs), and ongoing governance controls. The magic happens when these two services work together: 

• Automated account provisioning through Account Factory with security guardrails baked in 

• Centralized logging across all accounts with immutable log storage 

• Preventive controls that stop risky configurations before they happen 

• Detective controls that continuously monitor for drift and compliance violations 

Phase 1: Establish Your Automated Landing Zone 

Automation Deep Dive 

AWS Control Tower’s Account Factory automates account creation using AWS Service Catalog under the hood. This means: 

• Template-driven provisioning: Every new account gets the same security baseline 

• API-driven workflows: Integrate account creation into your CI/CD pipelines 

• Automatic enrollment: New accounts are automatically registered with Control Tower guardrails 

Now that you have your automated landing zone in place, it’s time to tackle the foundation of all cloud security: identity and access management. 

Phase 2: Build a Strong Identity Foundation with Automation 

The Three Pillars of AWS Identity Security 

1. Retire the root account: Protect it with MFA and store the credentials in a vault; never use it for daily tasks. 

2. Centralize identities with automation: Connect Okta, Azure AD, or another IdP to IAM Identity Center and enforce MFA for every human user. Control Tower automatically configures this during landing zone setup. 

3. Least privilege by default: 

• Start with AWS-managed job-function policies only when needed 

• Automate permission reviews: Run IAM Access Analyzer continuously to flag overly broad permissions 

Success Metrics for Phase 2 

• MFA Adoption rate: 100% for all human users with enforced policy and regular compliance audits. 

• Permission violations: < 5 per month across all accounts with real-time monitoring and automated remediation 

• Identity governance compliance: 100% adherence to role-based access control (RBAC) principles 

With identity management automated, let’s focus on protecting your most valuable asset: your data. 

Phase 3: Protect Data Everywhere with Automated Controls 

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them 

Pitfall: Assuming default encryption settings are sufficient 
Solution: Implement organization-wide encryption policies through SCPs 

Pitfall: Forgetting about data in transit between services 
Solution: Use VPC endpoints and enforce TLS through guardrails 

Now that your data is protected, let’s build the detection and response capabilities that will keep you ahead of threats. 

Phase 4: Detect, Respond, and Automate at Scale 

The Three Layers of Detection 

1. Native threat detection with centralized management 

• GuardDuty in all regions & accounts (Control Tower can enable this organization-wide) 

• Security Hub with the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard across all accounts 

2. Centralized monitoring through Organizations 
   Stream CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and GuardDuty findings to the Log Archive account; alert on root logins, IAM policy changes, and high-severity findings 

3. Automated remediation at scale 
   EventBridge rules → Lambda functions that isolate non-compliant resources across all accounts in your organization. 

Automation Highlights 

• Organization-wide deployment: Use Control Tower’s StackSets integration to deploy security tools across all accounts simultaneously 

• Centralized alerting: All security events flow to the Audit account for unified monitoring 

• Automated response: Cross-account Lambda functions can quarantine resources in any member account 

Success Metrics for Phase 4 

• Mean time to detection: < 30 minutes for critical threats with basic CloudWatch alarms and GuardDuty notifications 

• Mean time to response: < 2 hours for high-severity incidents with manual investigation and documented runbooks 

• False positive rate: < 15% for automated alerts as teams learn to tune detection rules 

Security is never “done” – it requires continuous improvement and adaptation to new threats. 

Phase 5: Continuous Security Evolution and Optimization 

Automation Focus Areas 

• Continuous compliance monitoring: Control Tower’s detective guardrails run 24/7 across all accounts 

• Automated drift remediation: When accounts drift from baseline, Control Tower can automatically re-apply configurations 

• Self-healing infrastructure: Combine Control Tower with AWS Systems Manager for automated patching and configuration management 

Automated Guardrail Management 

Control Tower’s APIs now allow you to programmatically manage guardrails across your organization: 

• Enable/disable controls based on compliance requirements 

• Customize detective controls for your specific use cases 

• Automate control assignment to new OUs as they’re created 

Cross-Account Automation 

With AWS Organizations and Control Tower working together, you can: 

• Deploy security tools to all accounts simultaneously using StackSets 

• Centralize log collection from hundreds of accounts automatically 

• Enforce policies across the entire organization through SCPs 

Putting It All Together 

Follow the phases in order but iterate—security is never “done.” Most teams can complete Phases 1–3 within 60 days, then mature their detection and response capabilities over the next two quarters. The key difference with this approach is that automation is built in from the start, not added later. 

Remember the Four Pillars: 

• Automate first: every manual step today is tomorrow’s breach window 

• Guardrails over gates: preventive controls that keep dev velocity high win hearts and audits 

• Measure relentlessly: Control Tower’s compliance dashboard is your yardstick, so use it 

• Scale through orchestration: AWS Organizations + Control Tower handle the complexity so you can focus on business value 

The beauty of this approach is that as your organization grows from 10 accounts to 100+, the security and governance overhead stays manageable because it’s automated from the foundation up. 

Ready to Get Started? 

Building a secure AWS foundation doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start with Phase 1 this week, and you’ll have a solid foundation in place within 60 days. 

Need help implementing these recommendations? The WEI team has helped dozens of organizations build secure, scalable AWS environments. Contact us to discuss your specific requirements. 

Questions about Control Tower guardrails, Organizations SCPs, or automated account provisioning?  

Coming up next: Part 3 of our series covers Azure Security Blueprints and Microsoft’s five-pillar security model. Subscribe to stay updated!  

The post AWS Security Foundations: Your Step-by-Step Roadmap appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Welcome to the third installment of WEI’s ongoing DevOps for SysOps Series. Previously, we discussed Git and Configuration as Code (CaC). Now, let’s focus on Ansible is an open-source IT automation platform developed by Red Hat. Ansible enables organizations to automate a wide range of IT tasks, including provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. If you are looking to automate things like server deployment, cloud provisioning, software installation, and configuration updates, this is the quick read for you.

Key Features of Ansible

Forrester Research identified Red Hat Ansible as an industry leader in infrastructure automation in 2024. Here are some of the standout features that make Ansible so popular and effective today:

• Compatibility: Ansible can be used across various platforms including Mac, Linux, Windows, and even non-operating systems like routers and switches. This broad compatibility makes it a great fit for hybrid environments and mixed-infrastructure organizations.
• Agentless: There are many tools out there that require you to install a bit of software first to communicate with the target host. Ansible isn’t one of them as it communicates directly with systems using standard protocols. This reduces overhead, simplifies setup, and minimizes security concerns tied to third-party agents.
• SSH Protocol: Instead of an agent, Ansible uses SSH by default, which is a widely supported protocol and readily used by IT admins. If you are using Windows, it can use the Windows remote management protocol which can be easier to work with for Windows hosts.
• Idempotence: This is a word you don’t use every day. This feature allows Ansible to run scripts repeatedly without causing issues because Ansible is smart enough to check the state of the machine and only performs actions that are necessary. Once a script is run once, it won’t be run again.
• Extensibility: Ansible is extensible, which means you can keep adding to it beyond its core capabilities. Its modular design gives you the flexibility to tailor automation to your unique environment and workflows.
  

What is YAML?

Another feature that makes Ansible so popular is its use of declarative scripting language. A declarative language focuses on describing the desired end state of a system, rather than outlining the exact procedural steps to reach that state. The descriptive scripting language that Ansible uses is YAML, a human-readable data serialization format. It is structured to be easily understood by both people and machines. This clarity and simplicity make YAML ideal for writing Ansible playbooks.

Components of YAML

We mentioned playbooks, which are one of the primary components of YAML. Playbooks are where the action happens. Ansible playbooks serve as blueprints that define the desired state and configuration of your managed nodes, orchestrating complex workflows and multi-step processes with clarity and precision. A playbook is basically a file that describes a series of automation tasks to be executed on specified hosts or groups of hosts. Each playbook consists of one or more “plays,” and each play consists of a list of tasks. Playbooks are executed from top to bottom, with each play and task running in the order they are listed.

Some of the other components that make up Ansible are:

• Modules: These are packages of code that Ansible executes against predefined hosts. Modules are the core of Ansible’s functionality and can be executed over SSH or other protocols
• Plugins: Plugins augment Ansible’s core functionality. They can be used to extend Ansible’s capabilities beyond its basic functions 
• Inventories: Inventories are used to organize groups of hosts. While technically not required, leveraging inventories allows users to take full advantage of Ansible’s functionality 
• Variables: Variables can be assigned in various ways and are used to customize configurations for different hosts or groups.

Two Versions to Choose From

Ansible comes in two forms – a free version and a paid version. The free version comes as a command line interface (CLI) version. It is very basic, but suitable for a single user working on a single machine. If you’re a small organization with a single senior IT admin, it might be all you need.

For those seeking more functionality without cost, there is AWX, the free and open-source upstream project for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. While AWX provides a web-based user interface and REST API, it’s important to note that as a community-supported project, it may experience stability issues and lacks enterprise support. This may make it potentially less suitable for production environments with critical automation needs…

…which leads us to the paid version called Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. It includes a web UI and API for managing playbooks, inventories, credentials, and workflows. This makes it much easier to use and scale than just running playbooks via CLI. Unlike the CLI version, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows collaborative work so it is great for teams.

The paid version also gets you these features not available in the CLI:

• Red Hat Support: Access to Red Hat support for troubleshooting and assistance 
• Event-Driven Ansible: This feature allows for additional automation, such as monitoring a web server and executing predefined actions if it goes down. Event-Driven Ansible helps organizations respond faster to incidents and automate complex workflows across their IT environments.
• Ansible Lightspeed: An AI-powered coding assistant that provides real-time code suggestions and can generate entire playbooks or tasks from natural language prompts within your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 
• RBAC (Role-Based Access Control): Built-in RBAC is crucial for team environments to ensure powerful automations are locked down, letting you control who can run what, on which hosts, with what credentials.
• Verified and Validated Collections: Access to pre-written, validated, and certified scripts from partners like AWS, Cisco, and Aruba. These collections are tested and supported, helping you deploy automation with confidence and speed.

Ansible in Action

Let’s start with a real basic example of YAML in action. Here we will add a user to a Linux host. The process involves creating a project folder, an inventory file, and a playbook. The inventory file lists the target hosts and their variables, while the playbook specifies the tasks to be executed. In this scenario, the task is to add a user to the host using the ansible.builtin.shell module. Let’s see an example.

Ansible Playbook for Creating a Local User:

# ——————————————————————————————————————-

– name: Create a local user on a single host

hosts: LinuxServer1

become: yes

tasks:

   – name: Add user “exampleuser”

     ansible.builtin.shell: useradd exampleuser

     args:

       creates: /home/exampleuser 

Components explained:

• Playbook name: Create a local user on a single host – This is a descriptive name for the playbook.
• Target hosts: hosts: LinuxServer1 – This specifies that the playbook will run only on the host or group named “LinuxServer1” defined in your Ansible inventory.
• Privilege escalation: become: yes – This tells Ansible to execute the tasks with elevated privileges (like sudo), which is necessary for user creation.
• Tasks section: Contains the list of actions to perform.
• User creation task:
  • name: Add user “exampleuser” – A descriptive name for this specific task
  • builtin.shell: useradd exampleuser – Uses the shell module to run the Linux command useradd exampleuser
  • args: section with creates: /home/exampleuser – This is an important idempotency check that prevents the command from running if the home directory already exists, making the playbook safe to run multiple times

Note:

While this will work, Ansible has a dedicated user module that would be more appropriate for this task. Modules help to re-use code and decrease complexity. The equivalent using the proper module would be:

– name: Add user “exampleuser”

ansible.builtin.user:

   name: exampleuser

   state: present 

The dedicated module handles idempotency automatically and provides more options for configuring the user account.

# ——————————————————————————————————————-

In addition to configuring users and groups, you can use Ansible to install or update software packages, reboot or shut down servers, manage files and directories or deploy and configure applications. There are so many things that Ansible can do. With its hundreds of built-in modules, it can automate everything from system updates and cloud provisioning to enforcing security policies. By making use of human readable YAML playbooks, users don’t need to master a complex programming language, and its agentless design means there is no additional software to deploy. Whether you’re managing a handful of servers or scaling to thousands across hybrid environments, Ansible provides the consistent and reliable automation framework that businesses are looking for today.

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Henry Ford showed the world the scalable advantage of assembly lines. Building a single car in your garage is certainly feasible, especially for a one-of-a-kind vehicle. However, this approach is impractical for mass production. Ford’s assembly line revolutionized manufacturing by enabling cars to be produced efficiently and at scale, making them accessible to the masses.  

Configuration as Code (CaC) is the equivalent of introducing an assembly line to deploy and manage your system configurations across your enterprise. A CaC approach transforms traditional configuration deployments into repeatable, automated, and scalable events. Rather than manually configuring each system, you can define the process once and replicate it efficiently across your multitude of environments, whether managing tens, hundreds, or thousands of systems. 

Watch: Introduction to CaC with Daniel Perrinez

A Close Look at CaC 

The founding principle of CaC is that configuration data is now treated as versioned artifacts. This allows for better tracking and iteration of changes. System configurations are defined in files and stored in source code repositories to ensure they are structured and version controlled. See our previous introductory blog on Git to learn more.  

CaC leverages these managed system settings to automate deployments across various environments to maintain consistency and reduce errors. It can be applied to a wide range of systems, including firewalls, switches, servers, and cloud infrastructure. 

While Git serves as the collaborative repository for tracking changes, CaC automation tools such as YAML, Ansible, and PowerShell are used to define and deploy configurations. These tools allow teams to manage infrastructure declaratively for readability and sharing. 

To better understand what CaC is fully capable of, let’s consider a real-life example of CaC.  

Scenario #1: Configuring VLANs 

Let’s take something as simple as creating or consolidating VLANs on switches. It is an easy task for an experienced network admin. You can create a VLAN within a minute on a designated switch. Let’s say you wanted to consolidate two VLANs into one – add another minute. But now let’s scale this task out to an entire fleet of 500 switches across different environments. Sure, you could copy and paste the code but now you introduce some challenges: 

• Human Error: Copy-pasting CLI commands risks typos or misconfigurations (e.g., incorrect VLAN IDs or trunk ports). 
• Lack of Visibility: No centralized tracking of changes or failures across devices. 

This traditional CLI approach hits its limitation quickly as the number of switches increases. However, using a configuration as code approach now transforms the process into a scalable, auditable workflow using a one-two punch: 

Version Control with Git: 

Store VLAN configurations in a Git repository (e.g., vlans.yaml), to enable: 

• Change Tracking: Compare revisions to see when VLAN 30 and 40 were merged into VLAN 50. 
• Collaboration: Teams review changes via pull requests, catching errors before‾������Dz⳾��Գ�.��
• Rollbacks: Revert to a known-good state if issues arise. 

Automated Deployment with Ansible: 

• By defining configurations in YAML files, Ansible ensures that the settings are consistently applied across all switches and ensures configurations are applied only if needed 
• Use Ansible playbooks to deploy VLAN configurations with real-time feedback to show the success or failure of the deployment along with error details. 

Configuration as Code does more than just save you time in this case. It reduces risk, improves collaboration, and transforms network operations from reactive to reliable and repeatable. 

Watch: What Is HPE Private Cloud AI?

Advantages of CaC 

The above scenario clearly demonstrated some of the key advantages of a configuration as code approach for large enterprises: 

• CaC allows system settings to be managed and versioned in a source code repository like Git where configuration changes can be tracked and reverted if necessary  
• Defining system settings in files and automating their application ensures that configurations are consistent across different environments  
• CaC enables the reproducibility of configurations which makes it easy to replicate environments for testing, development, and production  

• CaC reduces manual errors by automating the process of configuring systems using tools like Ansible  
• The agentless architecture of Ansible makes it highly scalable and efficient in managing configurations across large environments, whether it’s tens, hundreds, or thousands of nodes.

Scenario #2: Creating VMs in AWS 

Creating several VMs in AWS is a relatively simple task. It is part of the beauty of using a cloud portal. Creating three VMs can be completed within a dozen clicks or so. This includes things such as selecting options like OS, instance type, key pairs, storage, and a few tags. While this process is manageable for small-scale tasks, it becomes inefficient and error prone when scaled to hundreds of VMs or multiple environments such as dev, test and production. Relying on the manual creation of VMs using a GUI interface increases the likelihood of inconsistencies and forgotten configurations.  

Automated Method Using Terraform ‘Infrastructure as Code’ (IaC): 

“Infrastructure as Code” is a subset of “Configuration as Code” and largely achieves the same goals. Terraform IaC allows defining cloud resources, like VM configurations, in a single code file. Key attributes like instance count, types, and tags are stored in version-controlled files (e.g., Git). Tags defined in the Terraform configuration are used for tracking and categorizing cloud resources.  

The advantages of this approach are: 

• Ensures all configurations are consistent across environments 
• Easily deploys hundreds of VMs without additional effort 
• Eliminates repetitive manual input, and facilitates collaboration by enabling teams to review and track changes over time 
• Tags and configurations are stored in code, ensuring standardization and reducing human error 

CaC Best Practices 

Here is a list of CaC best practices to ensure you are getting the most out of your projects: 

• Those just getting into CaC should use an integrated development environment (IDE). A great choice is Visual Studio Code. It’s widely supported and it is free. 
• Auto-check your code using tools like linters. 
• Use Git to encourage greater developer collaboration and code review. Git ensures that configuration changes are tracked and can be reverted if necessary 
• Don’t start from scratch. Both Terraform and Ansible offer published templates to get you started. You can also go to Github or Gitlab and search for the code you need because chances are it is mostly written already by someone else in the community.  

Configuration as Code is fundamentally about working smarter, not harder. By minimizing the risk of human error, streamlining scalability, and offering a transparent audit trail for changes, CaC enhances efficiency and consistency across IT operations. CaC can help transform how your IT teams operate to ensure a future-ready IT ecosystem that can easily evolve and scale with your business.  

The post Work Smarter, Not Harder: Transform IT with Configuration as Code appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Imagine your company just hired a new developer. The new developer is joining a team that is working on a big legacy software application. The task of becoming acclimated with the code stack will be challenging, especially in trying to discern what the other team members have contributed, and the direction the code is headed. Years ago, this would have been quite a task.

Thanks to Git, onboarding a new developer is now much simpler and more efficient. With Git, the new developer can quickly clone the repository to access the project’s complete codebase. That not only includes the code itself, but all files, folders, and the entire history of changes. Now the new member of the team can review past commits to better understand the evolution of the code over time. They know what features have been added and how bugs have been fixed. More importantly, they begin to understand how their own work will fit into the project in an accelerated fashion.

What is Git?

Git is a distributed version control system used to track changes in source code during software development. It helps teams collaborate, manage code history, and coordinate work on files across multiple contributors. Originally developed by Linus Torvalds for the development of the Linux kernel, Git has become the de facto standard for version control due to its speed, flexibility, and ability to support non-linear workflows.

Watch our Introduction to Git workshop to see how Git empowers modern development teams to version, manage, and secure their code at scale.

The Fundamentals of Git

To understand how Git works, you need to know how two fundamental components operate, commits and branches.

• A ���dz���������is a snapshot of the project’s current state that captures changes made to files and directories at a specific point in time. It serves as a “save point” in the version control process, which allows developers to record meaningful updates to the codebase.
• A branch is an independent line of development within a repository that allows developers to work on specific features, fixes, or experiments without affecting the main codebase. Developers can create their own branches to isolate their work so they can make their own changes or test ideas.

Let’s illustrate how this can work using a simple local development scenario. Suppose I am a developer, and I just installed Git on my desktop. I can create a new repository to serve as the storage location for my project. Every repository has a ‘main’ branch. This is where I commit my initial code changes. This committed code now becomes version one of the new application.

Now, I am ready to work on new features so I create a “development branch” that will be independent of the main branch. Once version two is created, I commit it to the development branch where it can be reviewed and tested before being committed to the main branch. The ability to conduct code reviews by multiple peers is an important feature of Git as it ensures that the code is thoroughly vetted and meets quality standards before being committed to production. 

---

Curious how Git’s versioning model extends beyond code? In the Configuration as Code workshop, we show how managing infrastructure with source-controlled files makes DevOps workflows more reliable and scalable.

Other Git Capabilities

We opened this article with an example of distributed collaboration. Git also provides disaster recovery capabilities by allowing users to back up their scripts and notes. If a laptop goes down, the central repository serves as an offsite safe place for recovery so developers can work with little disruption. Disaster recovery also allows developers to revert to previous configuration if needed.

Unlike other centralized version control systems, Git does not rely on constant internet access. This means that developers can work offline as the entire repository can be stored on a local device, including its full history. This allows developers to work independently regardless of the internet.

Git also enables users to reuse and modify existing code by allowing them to clone or fork repositories. Cloning creates a local copy of an existing repository so that users can experiment with changes without affecting the original repository. Forking creates a new separate repository. This new repository can even be under a different account. Forking is ideal for open-source projects where users can make changes in their forked repository and propose those changes back to the original repository through a pull request. A fork can also serve as the foundation for an entirely new project.

For insights on integrating Git into secure DevOps workflows, check out our blog on Enabling Secure DevOps Practices on AWS.

Git For IT Admins

Don’t think of Git as just a tool for developers. IT admins can utilize it for instances such as updating hundreds of switches across their networks. Switch configuration files are perpetually changed over time and Git allows IT admins to save switch configuration files in a repository. This gives an admin team the opportunity to track changes over time as each update is stored as a commit with a timestamp and description. With Git, device configurations are centrally managed and accessible.

Recommended Git Services

You may have heard about GitHub or GitLab, but neither of these platforms is Git itself. Instead, they are web-based SaaS platforms that rely on Git as their underlying version control system. Both GitHub and GitLab provide cloud-based repositories where developers can host, manage, and collaborate on code projects using Git’s version control capabilities. Both these platforms provide an array of tools for project management, collaboration, issue tracking, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). While there are other options out there, these two are the most popular. Whether you’re working on open-source projects, enterprise-level applications, or configuration code revisioning, GitHub and GitLab are great choices to harness the power of Git.

Best Git Practices

Using Git effectively requires adopting practices that ensure smooth collaboration, maintain code quality, and streamline workflows. Here are some expanded best practices for working with Git:

• Regularly commit your work to capture incremental changes as frequent commits create a detailed history. This makes it easier to track progress, troubleshoot issues, and roll back changes if needed.
• Write descriptive commit messages that clearly explain what changes were made and why, so that all teammates understand the purpose of the commit.
• Create branches for new features, bug fixes, or experiments to keep the main branch stable and clean. 
• Avoid direct commits to the main branch as untested changes can disrupt the project. 
• Collaborate through code review requests, to propose changes and ensure teammates review changes to the codebase.

Conclusion

Git’s distributed version control system allows developers to work independently while maintaining a complete history of changes. This balance enables seamless collaboration, efficient workflows, and robust code management. Developers can use branching to experiment freely, track progress, and ensure the integrity of their codebase. Two great ways to harness the power of Git are platforms like GitHub or GitLab which provide cloud repositories as well as integrated tools. Whether you’re a solo developer or part of a large team, Git can foster greater productivity, adaptability, and innovation in modern software development.

Next Steps: To learn more about how Git can transform your development processes or to explore how WEI can support your DevOps initiatives, contact us today and start your journey toward smarter, more efficient software delivery.

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In the previous posts in this series, we explored the fundamentals of cloud governance, strategies for managing shadow IT, best practices for building a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) and implementing continuous compliance on AWS. As organizations increasingly adopt DevOps practices to accelerate innovation, the challenge becomes ensuring that security is seamlessly integrated into this rapid development and deployment cycle. In this post, we’ll explore how to enable secure DevOps practices on AWS, highlighting key principles and best practices for embedding security into every phase of your development workflows.

How to Integrate Security Seamlessly into DevOps

Integrating security into DevOps means making security a shared responsibility across development, security, and operations teams throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). The goal is to catch and fix security issues early, reducing risk and cost while improving the overall security posture. By shifting security left, integrating security early in the process, and automating security checks, you enable faster, more secure development.

Key benefits of this approach include:

• Identifying and remediating vulnerabilities early, when they are easier and less costly to fix
• Empowering developers to write more secure code by providing automated feedback during development
• Reducing the risk of security breaches and compliance violations
• Increasing the speed and agility of software delivery by catching issues earlier

However, this shift isn’t without challenges. Integrating security into DevOps requires changes to existing processes, tools, and culture. Development, security, and operations teams must collaborate closely to build a shared understanding of risks and responsibilities.

Best Practices for Secure DevOps on AWS

Here are some essential practices for ensuring secure DevOps workflows on AWS:

Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Use tools like AWS CloudFormation and Terraform to define your infrastructure as code. This allows you to version control your infrastructure, apply security best practices consistently, and automate deployments. By scanning IaC templates with tools like and , you can catch potential security misconfigurations early before they make it into production.

Key benefits of IaC for security include:

• Consistency: Security controls are applied uniformly across all resources
• Traceability: All infrastructure changes are tracked in version control
• Automation: Security checks can be integrated directly into your deployment pipelines

Integrate Security into CI/CD Pipelines

Automate security checks within your CI/CD pipelines to continuously safeguard your applications. Implement tools and practices such as:

• Static code analysis to catch security vulnerabilities in the codebase
• Dependency scanning to identify vulnerabilities in third-party libraries
• Container image scanning to detect security risks in containerized applications
• Compliance checks using AWS Config rules to verify that resources meet security and compliance standards

Fail the pipeline if critical security issues are identified, ensuring that vulnerabilities never reach production. This proactive approach has several advantages:

• Early Detection: Vulnerabilities are caught early in development, reducing remediation costs
• Immediate Feedback: Developers receive quick feedback on security issues
• Continuous Compliance: Every change is automatically evaluated for compliance

Use Immutable Infrastructure

Adopt immutable infrastructure patterns to reduce the risk of configuration drift and ensure consistent, secure deployments. With immutable infrastructure, servers are never modified after deployment; updates are made by provisioning new instances from a known-good configuration. Use services like Amazon EC2 Image Builder to maintain secure, up-to-date machine images. Amazon ECR can store and scan images for known vulnerabilities for containerized workloads, while Amazon ECS or EKS helps manage deployments securely.

Security benefits of immutable infrastructure include:

• Consistency: All servers are deployed from a secure, known configuration
• Reduced Attack Surface: Replacing servers, rather than patching them, reduces the risk of configuration drift and vulnerabilities
• Faster Recovery: If a server is compromised, it can be quickly replaced with a clean instance

Implement Least Privilege Access

Follow the principle of least privilege when granting access to AWS resources. Provide users and services only the minimum permissions they need. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and policies to enforce fine-grained access controls and implement IAM best practices such as:

• Using IAM roles for EC2 instances and Lambda functions to assign temporary, role-based permissions
• Rotating access keys regularly to reduce the impact of compromised credentials
• Enforcing strong password policies and enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) for added security
• Regularly reviewing and pruning IAM permissions to ensure they align with users’ roles

These practices help to:

• Reduce the Blast Radius: In the event of compromised credentials
• Limit Insider Threats: By controlling access to critical resources
• Maintain Granular Audit Trails: For tracking resource access and activities

Monitor and Log Everything

Comprehensive monitoring and logging are vital to detecting, responding to, and preventing security incidents. Use AWS services like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail to collect logs and analyze resource activity:

• CloudWatch: Provides real-time monitoring and alerts for AWS resources and applications
• CloudTrail: Records all API activity, offering an audit trail for actions taken within your AWS environment

Aggregate logs from multiple sources to create a single pane of glass for security monitoring and incident response. Enable AWS Security Hub to get a consolidated view of your security posture across accounts and services. With comprehensive monitoring, you can:

• Detect and respond to incidents quickly
• Conduct forensic investigations to determine root causes
• Demonstrate compliance with regulations
• Identify trends for proactive risk mitigation

How WEI Can Help

Implementing secure DevOps practices on AWS requires the right tools, processes, and cultural alignment. WEI’s Cloud and DevOps Services can help you build and scale secure, compliant CI/CD pipelines on AWS. Our certified experts can assist you with the following:

• Assessing your current DevOps practices and identifying opportunities for automation and security integration
• Designing and implementing secure CI/CD pipelines using AWS developer tools and third-party solutions
• Embedding automated security checks and compliance controls into your workflows
• Providing training and enablement to help your teams adopt a security-first mindset

Contact us today to learn more about how WEI can help you enable secure DevOps practices on AWS.

Take Your Next Steps With WEI

Next Steps: WEI, an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, collaborates closely with customers to identify their biggest challenges and develop comprehensive cloud solutions. WEI emphasizes customer satisfaction by leveraging AWS technologies to enhance development, maintenance, and delivery capabilities.

Download our free solution brief below to discover WEI’s full realm of AWS capabilities.

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According to , 92% of organizations adopted a multi-cloud approach in 2021. Cloud strategies allow your enterprise to increase flexibility, consistently update, foster greater agility, and enable rapid innovation. However, there are a number of common cloud adoption mistakes enterprises struggle with due to the lack of proper cloud strategy, planning, and governance mechanisms.

In this article, we identify the top seven cloud adoption mistakes and provide a roadmap to help your enterprise avoid them.

Top Seven Cloud Adoption Mistakes

As many organizations adopt the cloud, there are small mistakes being made that prevent them from developing a strong cloud strategy. Here are the top seven mistakes enterprises often make while adopting the cloud:

1. Maintaining an old infrastructure mindset.
2. Absence of upfront governance policies.
3. A lack of control provisioning resources.
4. Underutilizing the “pay-as-you-go” model.
5. Forsaking continuous cleanup.
6. Not pursuing a DevOps culture.
7. A lack of automated remediation capabilities.

Your Roadmap To Avoid Cloud Adoption Mistakes

Cloud adoption can be challenging; however, having a successful cloud strategy can make your transition as seamless and manageable as possible. The following roadmap can prevent your enterprise from making costly cloud adoption mistakes.

1. Change your mindset: Understand that your existing infrastructure may be incompatible with the cloud system. Assess what you have, your existing data center, and your business objectives and link them to your cloud adoption strategy.
2. Create customized governance policies: To prevent uncontrolled cloud spending and enable more accurate resource planning for each business unit, your enterprise must define each core governance structure and clearly articulate its processes.
3. Gain control over the provisioning process: Your enterprise must perform application and infrastructure vulnerability assessments regularly. Additionally, it’s imperative to have an established security checklist to ensure vulnerabilities don’t increase.
4. Utilize the “pay-as-you-go” model: Investing in a cloud management platform will help your enterprise save costs by tracking underutilized resources and identifying recurring expenditures.
5. Eliminate wasteful resources: Organizations must develop a “consume or eliminate” process. Using as-a-Service platforms makes managing the cloud more efficient by allowing you to monitor all resources to determine if they’re underutilized.
6. Incorporate a DevOps culture: Reduce manual effort and increase reliability within your IT and engineering teams with a culture that values DevOps. Enterprises experience higher business value and better alignment with IT through breaking down silos and building flexible, software-enabled infrastructures.
7. Understand cloud compliance and security: Take a security-first approach with a cloud infrastructure that sustains business continuity and compliance. This lowers costs, minimizes risks, and reduces complexities in the infrastructure.

How Nutanix Can Prevent Cloud Adoption Mistakes

Nutanix Beam is a multi-cloud governance service that provides enterprises deep visibility and rich analytics. It monitors your cloud consumption patterns and proactively identifies idle and underused resources. The solution also provides one-click fixes for cost optimization and security compliances across your cloud environment. This solution also identifies vulnerabilities in real-time using policy-based automation to resolve potential threats before they become concerns.

Beam will allow your enterprise to gain complete visibility, optimization, and control over your cloud consumption to ensure cost governance and security compliance. With Beam, you’ll have a successful cloud strategy that gives your developers the freedom to experiment and scale with ease, provision on-demand IT resources, and focus on rapid IT service delivery.

Here at WEI, we’re a trusted, independent resource to help vet cloud technologies, architectures, and the growing world of cloud service providers. We help enterprise IT teams to outline exactly what they need for an efficient, cost-effective cloud strategy. Contact WEI today to find out if Nutanix Beam is the best solution for your enterprise’s cloud strategy.

Next Steps: The recent challenges presented by the global pandemic showed how critical the need for greater elasticity really is. This has accelerated the transition to hybrid cloud architectures that utilize the appropriate mix of both private and public clouds. Today’s advanced HCI solutions are designed for this new era. Download our tech brief titled,

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After being popularized and exploding onto the IT scene almost a decade ago, the usage and management of containers is still evolving as new and more efficient organization strategies and tools are developed.

is one such tool. It was released in 2014 and over the last several years, has grown to be one of the most frequently utilized container management platforms.

That said, its popularity does nothing to simplify its core concepts and for executives, even those with an IT background, it can be hard to understand just how important and useful Kubernetes really is.

To make the conversation easier, we’ve pulled the top four things enterprise leadership should know about Kubernetes from ‘s Kubernetes for Executives report and other sources, and shared them in the article below.

1. What is Kubernetes?

The first step to understanding the benefits of Kubernetes (Koo-burr-NET-eez) is to actually learn what it is. This is typically the part that creates the most confusion for non-technical members of leadership teams.

As described on , “Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation.”

Depending on your own technical knowledge, that explanation might seem pretty simple or it may require further explanation. To start with, what is a container and what are they used for?

In VMware’s words, “ encapsulate applications and make them portable.” Essentially, containers provide a way to keep software running under identical conditions when it is moved from one computing environment to another. As an example, this might be migrating an application from a test environment into production.

For today’s enterprises, containers offer a sort of “plug and play” method for administration, development, and distribution of applications and their relevant dependencies.

Kubernetes goes one step further and offers scalable, automatic management and administration for distributed systems at the container level and serves as a starting platform for developers, while also preserving user choice and flexibility.

2. What are the benefits?

At its core, Kubernetes is an API-based, scalable and extensible solution, supported in all major public clouds and with a growing community of open-source solutions that complement its essential features.

Among its other benefits, Kubernetes offers the following, :

• Service discovery and load balancing
• Storage orchestration
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks
• Automatic bin packing
• Self-healing
• Secret and configuration management

For a non-technical audience, Kubernetes can best be described as an automated system that eliminates many of the manual provisioning and other tasks required for container management.

Its components, which are easily replaceable to allow the system to be extended to new requirements and environments, work together to coordinate activities and react to events.

3. Why Your Enterprise Needs Kubernetes

As shared by VMware, Kubernetes benefits the enterprise at multiple levels, from the IT teams that administer the digital environment, to application developers, and all the way up to CIOs.

The bottom line is:

• Kubernetes reduces the amount of time administrators need to spend on container management, allowing them to focus on more complex and beneficial tasks.
• It allows enterprises to deliver new software and products more quickly.
• Kubernetes improves infrastructure and application availability, resulting in increased productivity at every level of the enterprise.
• It improves security by allowing application developers to play an active role in designing securable application.

4. How To Get Started With Kubernetes

Starting your journey to Kubernetes adoption can seem daunting, especially for those enterprises that have yet to fully embrace cloud computing technologies. However, the rewards of taking the leap are undeniable, especially for those enterprises the prioritize software development.

If you aren’t sure where to get started, VMware and can help you pave your way forward.

Are Your Looking For A Partner On Your Journey To Kubernetes?

VMware offers enterprises solutions that will help them manage and run consistent infrastructure, across on-premises data centers and public clouds, improving user experience and overall business operations. Their innovative approach to container orchestration offers architecture that is easy to deploy and manage, increasing enterprise agility and flexibility.

NEXT STEPS: Is your organization using containers?

Click below to grab your copy of our FREE EBOOK, “The IT Leader’s Guide to Using Containers in Today’s Digital World.”

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How much are utilizing the cloud to support your business initiatives? Cloud environments offer immense benefit, especially as hybrid workforces gain traction. However, they also create unique challenges that legacy software, hardware and strategies are ill-equipped to handle.

One such challenge comes in the form of observability, or more specifically, the lack of it in cloud environments. Observability offers the chance to utilize collected data to improve user experience, reduce downtime, detect other issues that could negatively impact business, but traditional observability strategies just can’t keep up with today’s cloud environments.

In this second article in our two-part series on advanced observability, we’ll discuss how is addressing these challenges and what these solutions can do for your enterprise.

Learn more on this topic by checking out part one here.

Utilizing Automation For Scalability

In part one, we discussed some of the challenges associated with observability at scale. The problems can largely be boiled down to the following:

• The complexity of cloud environments.
• The ever-increasing volume of data and alerts.
• The resource and time commitment associated with monitoring microservices and containers.
• Siloed data.

According to a report from Dynatrace, “95% of applications in enterprise organizations are not monitored due to siloed tools and burdensome manual effort.”

A common solution is to try and tackle observability through adopting multiple siloed monitoring tools, but this approach only results in wasted resources and wasted time. Instead, enterprises must transform the way they collect and utilize data through artificial intelligence (AI) and .

Dynatrace is tacking this problem to offer enterprises continuous, automatic data collection and analysis, which translates to enterprise-grade scalability and end-to-end observability.

, which collects all monitored data within the environment, also automatically detects all applications, containers, services, processes, and infrastructure on start-up and in real-time. Instrumentation is also automatic, with zero configuration or code change. Data collection, including high-fidelity data like metrics, logs, and user experience data, begin as soon as the system component becomes available.

Auto-baselining is also included, with Dynatrace’s smart baselining adapting dynamically to environment changes. Finally, and perhaps best of all, updates are automatic as well, reducing ongoing maintenance through continuous, automatic, and secure updates throughout the entire environment.

Getting Context From Your Data

In environments where data is siloed, assessing the health of the system as a whole can be next to impossible. Alerts that may have a common cause can go unnoticed and the underlying issue unaddressed. For this reason, Dynatrace has prioritized offering contextual metadata to help administration teams understand what the raw data is telling them.

Using this metadata, Dynatrace creates a real-time topology map, which captures the relationships and dependencies for all system components up and down the stack, as well as horizontally between services, processes, and hosts. This map reveals the actual causal dependencies for the collected data, and also acts as a key foundational piece that enables the strategic use of AI in observability.

AI Offers The Answers IT Teams Need

Dynatrace’s AI engine, , takes the burden off of IT teams and automates anomaly root-cause analysis, reducing the manual efforts required for advanced observability.

To set it apart from other AI platforms, Dynatrace prioritized the following when designing Davis:

• Precise code-level root-cause analysis, which allows Davis to pinpoint malfunctioning components in milliseconds.
• Identification of bad deployments to offer the exact deployment or configuration change that caused an anomaly.
• Looking beyond the unknown. Davis looks beyond predefined anomaly thresholds to detect any unusual “change points” in the data.
• Automatic hypothesis testing before making real-time decisions.
• Removing repetitive model learning or guessing to move beyond machine learning approaches.

All in all, Dynatrace is reducing the manual aspects of advanced observability, making it simpler and easier for enterprises, regardless of the scale or complexity of the IT environment.

Ready for Advanced Observability?

As a leader in software intelligence, Dynatrace is simplifying cloud complexity and accelerating digital transformation for enterprises around the world. Instead of just more data and more time spent gathering it, Dynatrace offers solutions that help enterprises use the data they collect and offer improved business outcomes. Find out what you could be missing from your data and processes — contact WEI today to learn more about what’s possible with the Dynatrace platform and how you can leverage it for your business.

NEXT STEPS: Find out how Automation and AI is helping companies accelerate innovation for their customers and for their business. Check out our tech brief below to learn more.

The post How Observability with Dynatrace Can Improve Business Outcomes, Part 2 appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

How familiar are you with observability? The concept has gained traction as enterprises digitally transform their IT environments and embrace the cloud. For many companies, observability offers the chance to utilize collected data to improve user experience, reduce downtime, detect other issues that could negatively impact business, and more.

However, traditional observability strategies just can’t keep up with today’s cloud environments. The rapidly increasing size and complexity of these environments dwarfs manual instrumentation and performance tools, especially as enterprises need complete visibility into every component of their environments.

So, how can today’s enterprises achieve the level of observability they need, and most importantly, utilize their data to improve business outcomes? In the article below, we’ll discuss how Dynatrace is addressing these challenges and what these solutions can do for your enterprise.

Getting Answers Out Of Your Data

As shared in a from Dynatrace and WEI, observing data is just to start. By properly utilizing the observed data, enterprises can shift from just collecting data to using it to make decisions that produce the business outcomes they need to be successful.

However, actually poses a problem. Some IT teams try and tackle observability through adopting multiple siloed monitoring tools, which inevitably leads to wasted resources, wasted time spent on monitoring and manual configuration, and struggling to collect and share data between tools. To properly monitor applications at the enterprise level, companies need to transform the way they collect and utilize data.

To address this need, Dynatrace developed their , which expands on traditional observability through automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to allow it to scale to the largest and most complex of environments.

Through this platform, enterprises can utilize the built-in AI-assistance to continuously to detect anomalies, improve IT productivity, and give IT more time for business innovation.

Cloud Environments Demand More

While application performance monitoring has always existed, legacy solutions were built for a time when life, and the enterprise, moved much slower. Software updates were an annual event and infrastructure was contained on-premises.

Today’s IT teams have a different world to contend with. Cloud adoption requires IT to be flexible and ready for the unexpected. Most importantly, IT teams need to be able to predict where issues may occur, rather than waiting to react once they’ve already happened.

Advanced observability offers this and more, reducing the amount of time IT teams spend manually solving problems and keeping the lights on. Enterprise leadership expects more out of IT, and the technology they manage, than ever. Advanced observability allows IT to fulfill the needs of the modern enterprise and be a valuable, contributing part of the business, instead of just a cost-sink.

The Tools For Observability Success

Just as yesterday’s strategies can no longer be applied to today’s problems, the tools utilized by IT must also evolve.

To effectively manage the scale and complexity of the modern cloud environment, IT must rely on automation and AI. Legacy systems typically also focused only on collecting three specific data types: metrics, traces, and logs. However, this data on its own doesn’t offer the actionable insights.

To address this need, Dynatrace has developed , which is responsible for collecting all monitoring data within the monitored environment. It offers enterprises additional information, including user experience data, for “full-stack, end-to-end code-level observability.”

As shared by Dynatrace, this offers answers through three distinct capabilities:

• Continuous and automatic discovery and instrumentation, which ensures always-on coverage without manual configuration.
• Topology information, which offers context across the full-stack and for the data being observed.
• A causation-based AI engine, which offers actionable answers to problems through real-time analysis.

By combining software intelligence, automation, and AI, Dynatrace is helping enterprises make informed, intelligent business decisions, with fewer resources and time than traditional observability solutions.

Are You Looking To Start Your Journey To Advanced Observability?

As a leader in software intelligence, Dynatrace is simplifying cloud complexity and accelerating digital transformation for enterprises around the world. Instead of just more data and more time spent gathering it, Dynatrace offers solutions that help enterprises use the data they collect and offer improved business outcomes.

NEXT STEPS: Learn how Dynatrace transformed their own business and how you can too with automation, DevOps and AI in our new tech brief. Click below to start reading!

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Today’s IT teams face many challenges, especially as the IT infrastructure continues to become more complicated. Between the high standards for application performance and staying on top of rapidly evolving security threats, IT teams wear many hats, which are only growing more numerous and heavier as time goes on.

As a result, IT must prioritize solutions that offer agility without creating undue burdens through a need for manual administration.

In the article below, we’ll discuss the ins and outs of , a platform that has recently been growing in popularity amongst IT groups prioritizing productivity and automation.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Overview

As a comprehensive solution, the includes several different products, all of which support improved IT productivity. These include Content Collections, the Automation Hub, the Automation Services Catalog, and more.

The cornerstone is , which is based on technology available in the AWX open-source community and offers enterprise-scale operations, analytics, and security, while also offering integrations with third-party systems. It allows IT teams to centralize IT infrastructure through a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications, and graphical inventory management.

The dashboard provides a “heads-up, NOC-style display” and offers a simple and clean user interface (UI) for administrators, reducing visual clutter and making actions quick and efficient. As the infrastructure is automated, administrators can see real-time job status updates, with plays and tasks broken down by each machine. The status of other types of jobs, like cloud inventory refreshes, can be found in additional views within the Ansible Tower UI.

With Ansible Tower Workflows, IT teams can easily model complicated processes. Administrators can chain any number of playbooks, updates, or other workflows, even those that use different inventories, have different users, or utilize different credentials.

Ansible Tower also security logs all automation activity, including relevant information such as which user ran it and how it was customized. This information is securely stored and is viewable at a later date, or exported for company records. Ansible Tower also offers inventory synchronization with comprehensive asset tracking and CMDB source, helping ensure automated actions are aligned with the most up-to-date system state and configuration data.

Benefits and ROI of Red Hat Ansible for IT Automation

Now that we’ve shared some of the most exciting features of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, let’s discuss the value that enterprises can gain from the solution.

In a , which featured interviews from Red Hat Ansible Tower customers, study participants cited benefits including, “the ability to meet DevOps requirements for private cloud and the ability to customize thereby making it easier for DevOps resources to be deployed rapidly and easily. They also cited business benefits such as total cost of ownership, the ability to offer standardized automation, and the fact that their developers were already familiar with and comfortable working on open-source technology.”

Other benefits of the solution, as observed by the participants, included:

• More agile IT operations.
• Infrastructure configuration standardization.
• Multiple teams brought together.
• Integration with an agile DevOps model.

In their research, IDC found that enterprises utilizing Red Hat Ansible Automation were deploying applications faster and reducing the time to market, managing IT systems more efficiently, building a strong foundation for DevOps efforts, and increasing the number of applications and features.

When quantified, these and other benefits provided by the solution were found by IDC to offer significant financial gains. When averaged, Red Hat Ansible Automation customers saw a 68% improvement in productivity for IT infrastructure management, which translated to a $460,000 staff time value.

In terms of development, Red Hat Ansible Automation customers saw a 75% increase in the number of new applications. Customers also saw a 41% improvement in the time spent by staff managing applications. IT security productivity also saw improvements, with enterprises reporting a 25% improvement in staff time.

The benefits of Red Hat Ansible Automation are clear and enterprises around the globe are taking advantage of the cost savings and productivity gains that can be found through its automation strategies.

Ready to get started with Red Hat Ansible for IT Automation?

Red Hat is a leading provider of enterprise open-source solutions for digital transformation, automation, cloud-native development, and more. Through an extensive portfolio of solutions, Red Hat is helping enterprises standardize their IT infrastructure and manage complex IT environments. If you’re ready to explore Ansible for your business, contact WEI today. Our experience can help answer your questions and we can help you find opportunities to get started with Red Hat Ansible Automation.

The post The ROI Of Red Hat Ansible for IT Automation appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

So, what is the key? In one word – Morpheus. In Greco-Roman mythology, Morpheus is one of the sons of Hypnos, the god of sleep and dreams. In the era of the hybrid cloud in which business never sleeps, there is a new Morpheus, . Morpheus Data is a next-generation hybrid cloud management and application infrastructure automation engine. It’s a completely agnostic cloud management platform which really means it provides you the tools to get internal IT over the finish line in your quest to attain greater agility, control, efficiency and most of all speed across your entire IT estate.

The Need for Automation

IT touches nearly every department and aspect of the organization today. While IT has brought rampant innovation, it often times remains a bottleneck as legacy approaches can’t keep up with demand for digital services. As a result, many IT departments find themselves contending with Shadow IT as internal business units seek other alternatives to get the job done faster. While the objective of speedier deployments may be achieved in the short term, shadow IT reduces visibility and control for internal IT, not to mention the potential security holes and cost overruns it tends to create.

In a recent involving nearly 2,000 CIOs, 76 percent said that the demand for new digital products and services increased in 2020. The kicker was that 83 percent project it will increase in 2021. Said one survey respondent, “There is no going back to the way business used to be.” This means that businesses must further scale their IT infrastructure and Operations so that new services can be deployed across any platform within their as quickly as possible. This can only be achieved by eliminating manual tasks and vastly reducing the number of hand-offs across the workstream that adds unnecessary deadtime to new releases.

These lofty goals can only be achieved through new automation practices and the utilization of self-service provisioning for DevOps and IT engineers. In our recent Tech Brief titled, “,” we explain how these new methodologies can ensure you fulfill the next step of your company’s digital evolution. We also discuss the rapid speed at which companies are embracing these new approaches, as well as the reasons why so many will fail in the end without the right tools and skills.

Morpheus Automation

Gartner describes the shared self-service platform as a “digital toolbox” of Infrastructure and Operations capabilities. According to a recent report by Gartner concerning , 75 percent of large enterprises will build self-service infrastructure platforms to enable rapid product innovation. Now consider that only 15 percent of large enterprises utilized them in 2020. How will organizations possibly achieve these dreams?

Morpheus Data may not be the god of dreams, but it provides the tools to make dreams of automation and self-service provisioning become a reality. With Morpheus, internal IT can enable a self-service provisioning portal in the course of an hour and put it into service within a day. Admins can provision even complex hybrid cloud applications with the click of a mouse or a single line of code. One way in which Morpheus is able to accelerate deployments in rapid fashion is through the use of an instance catalog that provides on-demand delivery of operating systems, databases, web servers, virtual machines, containers and even bare metal.

In fact, Morpheus integrates with over 90 different third-party products right out of the box. It also provides a library builder for customers to add virtual images as custom instance types to the existing provisioning catalog. Morpheus also accommodates container environments in order to increase the portability of your applications amongst your multiple cloud platforms. It can make Kubernetes as easy to deploy and manage as VMware. The end result is the ability to provision services into virtually any private or public cloud without waiting on IT. By eliminating wait times and handoff, organizations can now speed up application deployments by 150x!

Speed doesn’t have to cost more, however. Morpheus can lower your by up to 30 percent. The Morpheus cloud cost analytics engine compares utilization and costs across available clouds to help you make decisions on where workloads should be provisioned. It then provides rightsizing guidance for resource and cost optimization in terms of CPU, RAM, storage, sizing and power state. Morpheus can then project visible cost trends and detailed performance and cost metrics.

Governance doesn’t have to be sacrificed for speed, either. Morpheus can help you organize your clouds into groups to give you greater control and manageability concerning access and governance. It not only gives you the ability to share multi-tenant resources but can even add multi-tenant sharing to typically single-tenant platforms like VMware ESXi and Nutanix. You can assign permissions to networks, data stores, resource pools and folders as well as compliance policies. Besides automating deployments, Morpheus also automates compliance checking, vulnerability management and security measurement.

Start accelerating hybrid cloud deployment today

The year 2020 showed us how speed is of the essence when reacting and adapting to ever changing environments and challenges. Morpheus Data is the next generation cloud management solution that can give you the speed to react to whatever unknown challenges lie ahead.

A couple of next steps…

1. If you’re ready to take a closer look at Morpheus Data, we’re here to help. to start a conversation or see a demo. (or both!)

2. Get our FREE Checklist to help you maximize your hybrid cloud performance. Click below to start reading.

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The Digital Transformations that the world has undergone has led to an insatiable appetite for applications and built a robust reliance on them. This reliance on apps and infrastructure has been greatly magnified this past year by the absence of physical face to face contact stemming from remote work strategies. Because your business is dependent on applications, the performance of your business is tied to the performance levels of your applications. Now compound this with the great cloud migration, and it becomes challenging to discern what is truly happening out there with your apps and the cloud(s) in which they reside. These are but some of the reasons why your enterprise needs a Cloud and Application Monitoring solution that is built with the future in mind. Below are some of the benefits you can derive from a premier APM solution, such as Dynatrace.

1. Continuously learn your environment

Proper inventory management is imperative for any retail or manufacturing company. If you don’t know what’s in your warehouses, then you don’t know the actual financial status of your business. The key is to put all of your inventory to work. Think of your enterprise network in the same way. Beneath your critical applications is a complete underground of underlying components and dependencies that make up the application stack. Undoubtedly, there is a fair percentage of this undergrowth that your IT team isn’t aware of. Chances are, there are a number of weak links in the application chain in these gray areas. Weak links create weak performance.

A premier cloud and application monitoring solution adds clarity to the full application stack. It can map dependencies between components such as processes, services, and hosts both horizontally and vertically. This allows you and AI-driven intelligence to truly understand the call relationships between these dependencies. This knowledge then allows for an intelligence based APM solution to pinpoint potential problems that can impact performance.

2. A greater reliance on applications

People have been using applications since the dawn of the PC. The reliance that employees and customers have with their involved applications today is unprecedented, however. When there is a disruption in a Zoom, Teams, or Slack session, the meeting stops and frustration builds. When a disruption occurs within your ecommerce application, money transactions stop. When your CRM doesn’t function correctly, the help desk lights up with call. Disruption is a dirty word today when it comes to enterprise applications. That is why observability is so important. A solution such as Dynatrace, provides a that can prevent problems before users see them, thus keeping your revenue generating sessions running as expected.

3. Stop playing detective

So, here’s how the traditional application monitoring process played out. The monitoring system consistently fed your admin support team with droves of log files. That backlog required the laborious task of sifting through all of the noise in order to piece the puzzle together. Let’s face it. Your IT team doesn’t have the time for that anymore, nor does your business have the money to finance it.

While some APM solutions dress up these logs with snazzy charts and dashboards, they still don’t provide answers. That is changing, however. Modern observability solutions created for today’s digital transformation trends, such as the Dynatrace , are designed to deliver answers, not endless logs that no one wants to read. Dynatrace AI uncovers the root of the problem in order to automatically discover and prioritize answers to issues instantly. Your company doesn’t have time for disruption, nor does it have time to solve them. In some cases, problems are remediated by the time your admins are notified. That’s a major improvement from traditional monitoring processes.

4. Automate cloud operations

Why have so many enterprises migrated resources to the cloud in the past decade? One of the chief reasons is scalability. Enterprises today have the ability to match resources with workload demand in real time thanks to the ease at which servers, services and software defined components can be spun up and retired. Shouldn’t your APM solution be able to scale in equal fashion? Cloud monitoring offers you the same levels of scalability and flexibility as any other cloud-based solution within your environments. It can also provide you valuable insight into which clouds are being used for specific applications and data queries.

With Dynatrace you can simplify cloud operations through AI and automation to build and run cloud native apps faster. 

5. Compliance and SLA & SLO confirmation

While there are a great many benefits to cloud computing, there is always a presence of nagging uncertainty. How certain are you that your SLA performance agreements are being delivered? How do you know if your company is meeting its security compliance requirements? APM can help clear up these uncertainties, giving you the insights and information to show you what is truly going on within your on-premises facilities, as well as that murky location we all know as the .

6. Eliminate inefficiencies across your IT environment

A big part of managing a business is maximizing the efficiencies of the involved departments. Maximizing the efficiency of your shipping or manufacturing departments leads to greater profitability. Now think about efficiency in term of your IT environment. Maximizing the efficiencies of your application stacks can significantly enhance the digital user experience. An effective APM goes further by focusing on environment optimization, locating looping code, excess DB calls or those extra network hops that have plagued you for years. It can also eliminate duplicative work efforts for your staff by automating monitoring functions that were once manually driven. By providing granular directives to your support staff, issues can be dealt with in record time, saving you labor hours.

One more thing

We would be remiss not to talk about the power of self-healing. No, this blog is not about to take a turn toward meditation and breathing exercises. What we are talking about here is automating remediation and building reliable solutions. AI is a great tool for identifying and remediating issues, but you need a solution that enables you to use that insight to build resilient systems. Leveraging modern monitoring tools enables you to execute specific remediation actions in a much smarter and efficient way. If you give the ability to embed Dynatrace into their delivery pipeline they can get feedback right away, which enables early optimization.

Andreas Grabner from Dynatrace goes into greater detail about Site Reliability Engineering and the self-healing capabilities of Dynatrace in his blog article here:

Next Steps: In the time you have read this article, an APM could have already averted a disrupting event within your enterprise. There are a lot more than six benefits that can be derived from an intelligence based APM solution such as Dynatrace. We invite you to reach out to our subject matter experts here at WEI to find out all of the ways that a software intelligence solution driven by automation and AI can benefit your company today.

Continue learning more about automation and continuous delivery in our tech brief below, “How to Accelerate Your Business Transformation with DevOps and Automation.”

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Each Friday you can expect to see a new “Industry Info to Know” blog post from WEI consisting of a roundup of articles from industry experts, analysts, and our partners that we find insightful and helpful. We will also include links to industry news that you need to know about, news that will impact your business so you can plan ahead for it. We all need to help each other right now, we’re all in IT together.

As a team of trusted advisors to your company, we put a lot of effort into perfecting our practice. We are continuously learning, testing, and expanding our expertise across all facets of the enterprise IT landscape. That being said, we have an obligation to stay ahead of trends, look forward to the future of IT and provide insights to help our customers navigate the ever-evolving IT landscape.

There were a lot of great articles that caught our attention this week. Let’s take a look…

Industry News Insights

Remote access needs strategic planning right now
Regardless of the length of the current pandemic disruption, IT must plan for situations in which it will have to support a large distributed workforce. This Network World article discusses why IT pros should start work on a better remote-access architecture, focusing on secure access service edge (SASE).
Read more

Nutanix DR Multi Site Recovery
In a world where uncertainty is certain and IT disasters don’t come with a warning, IT leaders cannot afford to take the risk of not being prepared. Learn about how Nutanix supports three major DR topologies, with details for multi-site disaster scenarios and recovery workflows.
Read more

One of the goals of NetOps and DevOps teams is to optimize the application experience, but complex infrastructure and dynamic application flows pose challenges. In this post from Cisco, learn how Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud simplifies workflows by automating the tasks needed to deliver a better application experience.

How do you create a consistently functional remote work environment when faced with inconsistent home internet connections that your employees are using? This article from an HPE VP shares six best practices that can help you significantly improve the overall functionality of your remote work environment in the face of inconsistent last-mile connections.

This CIO.com article shares how corporate IT at Oshkosh Corporation has shifted its mindset from supporting core technologies to one that is more closely in tune with business objectives and customer needs. Plus, learn about 5 keys steps for digital transformation that helped them transition the business.

Cisco’s 2020 Global Networking Trends report provided a glimpse into what that future means for IT networking professionals. This article discusses new jobs that will emerge to address changing IT needs such as business translator, network guardian, network detective, and more.

This pandemic has reshaped the economy, the workforce and how technology supports all of it. CIOs are now looking to the future to prepare for the lingering effects it will have on business technology. See what CIO Dive has pulled together as some of the most pertinent stories to emerge from the last two months.

Industry Conferences Update

We are actively monitoring the status of industry tradeshows and conferences and will provide updates as they come in. We’ve been referring to this helpful roundup from SDxCentral: .

Assess your remote worker strategy today

We are finding that companies are all over the gamut when it comes to preparedness for remote workers at scale. WEI has experience and expertise in VDI and Desktop as a Service solutions from the industry’s leading vendors. We invite you to take us up on a VDI assessment or VDI Health Check up today.

How can we help?

We’ve been in tight communications with all customers and are providing peace of mind with the mantra, “Whatever you need, we’ll make IT work.” And we’ve answered the call, helping our customers with everything from supplying equipment, parts, cloud advice, architecture design, VDI, networking support, remote monitoring, staff augmentation services, and so much more… Contact us today to learn how we can help your business.

NEXT STEPS: Explore our other editions of the ‘Industry Info to Know’ Blog Series:

• Industry Info to Know – 05.01.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 04.24.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 04.17.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 04.10.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 04.03.20 Roundup
• Industry Info to Know – 03.27.20 Roundup

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The post Industry Info to Know – 05.08.20 Roundup appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.