IT automation and orchestration

The automation and orchestration of your IT infrastructure and/or services should move you away from traditional manual and error-prone configuration management. The promise is that your IT will be more agile, faster, and flexible, and all that will be achieved at lower operational costs.

These are all valid promises and realistic benefits. However, you should also consider that, in order to achieve them, there is more to do than just automate IT processes. The automation and orchestration of your IT require new skills from your teams. They need to get familiar with the new technologies and components, there are additional development/testing/staging requirements and, most importantly, the key is to move forward from established management practices.

At NIL, we understand that designing, implementing, and maintaining automation and orchestration solutions is not a straightforward process. It touches and alters the established IT dynamics on different levels, from people and processes to communication and team boundaries. Our set of services for building automation and orchestration solutions takes all of these requirements into account. It is based on DevOps practices that enable your IT to truly embrace and leverage the automation and orchestration solutions.

Our approach is especially suitable for large enterprises with dynamic IT environments that want to standardize the configurations, lower operational costs, and implement more agile IT. Developing an automation or orchestration solution with NIL is a consulting engagement that consists of two major components:

• Business requirements assessment with all of the relevant stakeholders. The exercise identifies the solution’s functional requirements and defines the IT infrastructure and services components that will be automated and included in the orchestration solution.
• Complete solution lifecycle consisting of solution design, solution development, solution implementation, knowledge transfer, solution support, and solution enhancement.

Defining the business requirements and with them the solution’s functional requirements is the most critical part of the engagement. The goal of this phase is to gain understanding as well as agreement on the solution business objectives and functional features between all of the relevant stakeholders and different IT teams.