Digital disruption is resulting in smarter and smarter devices, an explosion of business services, and increased complexity for data center professionals.   The initial response of many organizations was to increase virtualization and headcount only to discover that this was not the way to increase organizational speed and agility.   Meeting the challenges of today's digital world requires organizations to fundamentally change the way they deliver services to business and application teams - and this only happens by adopting automation.

Humans are brilliant but inconsistent.   Machines are fast but dumb.  At its most basic, automation combines human intelligence with the speed of machines to deliver consistent, error-free services without human intervention.  Automation can transform a mundane tedious task, such as setting up a new server, into one that delivers that new server faster, with greater consistency relieving your operations staff to focus on more strategic projects.

Where do you start?  Begin by converting a couple of your most popular repetitive processes into automated workflows.  After being released into production for self-service ordering, watch how your organization will flock to service delivery within minutes. Next, move to incident and problem management processes to further increase data center staff productivity.  Data center staff productivity increases because automation executes actions and tasks on each specific platform while allowing your staff to manage your holistic environment from a single, unified interface.

If your organization has not adopted automation, now is the perfect time.  Budgets are tight, technology and business service complexity is steadily increasing and qualified talent is scarce.  Research has shown that organizations that utilize automation as part of their business transformation, experience one or more of the following business outcomes:

• Improved time-to-market for products/services
• Higher customer satisfaction ratings
• Increased market leadership and quarterly revenue growth
• Ability to increase data center capacity with existing staffing levels

Although automation is a core element, it is part of a larger story.  Transforming your business to take advantage of digital transformation requires the installation of a private cloud that delivers:

• a new user experience through a self-service portal that empowers your employees and customers to interact and manage their services independent of where the service is located
• unified way to provision and manage a diverse range of hardware and management tools from a single user interface
• secure data center connectivity between private and hybrid environments
• secure application segmentation to deliver security across multiple tenants and tiers

When it comes to private cloud, Cisco believes is it all about how you want to consume private cloud automation.  Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud allows customers to consume automation at their pace without having to install every component.   Packaged as a single product, Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite has tools to automate the data center and applications while allowing application and business teams to order from a self-service user interface. Watch this video to learn more.

The pressure to respond faster continues to increase.  Take the first step towards transforming your business model to experience faster time-to-market allowing your business to become an industry disruptor.  To learn more go to:  www.cisco.com/go/cloudsuite