Self-service automated provisioning can help IT departments respond more efficiently and rapidly to business requests. Automation of manual provisioning process will cut down the deployment times from days and weeks to hours. It can save money by slashing provisioning time, and decreasing the potential errors inherent in manual processes. Most of the automated provisioning solutions automate only pieces of the end-to-end provisioning process. The automated provisioning process that doesn’t include all the steps and policies in the manual process is very risky. Application performance and internal security can be compromised if all the policies are not being applied during the provisioning process. Most of the IT departments are very skeptical about the vendors that don’t provide the self-service automated provisioning process in a holistic way.
In a traditional IT world, the application provisioning is a manual process with multiple personal involved and the service requests must navigate the organizational structure from end‐user to IT professionals such as server, storage and networking groups. IT used to control the entire provisioning process and ensures the compliance in the manual process. There are checks and balances by various personal in manual process and is typically pretty self-regulated system.
The critical aspect of automated provisioning is that IT departments must still remain in control of deployments. They must be able to specify resource quotas and specific configuration details to ensure that IT policies are not being circumvented. Overall, IT departments need a way to define, implement, and enforce polices and processes. These rules should ensure that environments remain in compliance with organizational standards. IT resources get allocated efficiently and correctly by established policies. The true operational efficiencies can only be realized if the operational processes and governance policies are integrated into the automated provisioning process.
A good self-service automated provisioning system must consider the following during the provisioning process:
- Ability to define application workload profiles/templates
- Ability to configure/define system policies by System admins – deployment and delivery
- Ability to configure/define security policies by IS admins
- Ability to configure/define resource specific policies by IT admins – computing, storage and networking
- Ability to auto-discover and keep up-to date information about IT resources inventory and configuration
- Continuous capacity monitoring
The database of IT infrastructure resources information is the foundation required by every automated provisioning product to automatically deploy IT resources. Policies are at the heart of all this automated provisioning process. A good automated provisioning system with current Infrastructure inventory, configuration and capacity information combined with policies set by admins will be ready to adapt to application workload requirements and provision the right resources. An automated provisioning product has to determine which host server to use and then deploy the application to this server. Identifying the right host server is critical to ensure the application deployments are in compliance with internal policies and also for application optimum performance.
