Very few organisations are migrating 100% to multiple Public Clouds and fully leveraging the capabilities of automation and orchestration. Some innovative CIOs however are adopting a multi-cloud strategy upfront, tailoring the design to provide the ability to ‘mix n match’ different Cloud Service Providers based on pricing, availability and compute load characteristics with a consistent automated approach.

By creating a cutting edge capability to fully automate the ability to quickly provision multiple, functionally complete and secure environments in any public cloud within an hour and clean-up afterwards allows innovative CIOs to remove bottlenecks on business growth, system reliability and software quality.

Here are three core cloud innovation strategies:

1. Automatically deploying entire software environments.  Most organisations either lift and drop their infrastructure into the cloud or use software like Puppet to automate deploying the infrastructure.  What they don’t do is deploy in a fully automated manner complete environments covering both infrastructure and applications and system software across code, database changes and configuration.

2. Adopting a “fix by rebuild” approach.  That is, redeploying the entire environments whenever you want to make any changes.  This is very much a systems thinking approach and is different from the traditional approach of directly patching changes to either infrastructure or applications.  Fix by rebuild opens up a range of opportunities with DR, vulnerability management, and quality improvements that are not possible with traditional approaches.

3. Supporting multiple cloud service providers independently.  That is, being able to deploy to multiple cloud service providers (for example, AWS, Azure) and move between them seamlessly.  This is different from current approaches of using multiple cloud service providers but not being able to switch between them.

Selected benefits of this approach include removing time and capability constraints by fully automating the provision of integrated suites of applications and databases (ie environments). This enables the ability to efficiently and quickly provide multiple, functionally complete and secure environments for clients and staff, and to create them within an hour instead of weeks and then remove them when finished.