BRYXX has two great tips for companies that want to accelerate their digitization: first standardize to your infrastructure, then focus on the automation of your infrastructure management. The goal? To eliminate tasks that add little value, freeing up time for innovation.
If you simplify the control and management of your infrastructure, you make it easier to set up new services, make upgrades, fine-tune security, and so on. Then your infrastructure becomes the driving force behind your digital innovation. This becomes a virtuous cycle. Automation eliminates time-sapping and repetitive tasks, freeing up your time for infrastructure projects that will make a real difference to your company.
Serve more customers faster
BRYXX is the ideal infrastructure management partner. For example, a cloud software provider — hosted by Oracle — asked us to create a separate set-up on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for each new customer. It took us about two days to complete the project, and after we had automated the various steps in the process, the company was able to work much faster. Every member of the BRYXX team can begin the set-up process within a couple of minutes. Then Puppet and Terraform start automatically, and the new customer is ready to go within two hours.
Consistent management
This kind of automation benefits everyone. The cloud software provider mentioned above can now serve its new customers more efficiently, and because the set-up is automated, BRYXX can easily handle the company’s rapidly growing number of end users. We have also automated the follow-up and maintenance of all those IT environments.
When we implement the security update from Oracle every month, we don’t have to perform the task for each environment, repeating the same exercise dozens of times. Instead all that’s needed is the proverbial push of a button via Puppet and the automated process is set in motion. In this way human errors are also eliminated. And thanks to automation, we can be sure every environment receives the same update in in exactly the same way.
Infrastructure as code
At the Bureau for Standardization — the organization that develops and sells standards in Belgium — we built an environment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which included a database, middleware, the use of APEX, and so on. There, too, we automated the management of the environment step by step using Puppet. In this way we teach our customers to look at their infrastructure in a different way, less as hardware and more as code.
We help our customers embrace the idea of infrastructure as code and then apply automation to it. This is particularly useful in the context of security. For example, we automatically scan the infrastructure for possible vulnerabilities. We check these automatically with Puppet Comply, and then the system automatically receives the correct patch. The advantage is an infrastructure that always has the most up-to-date security and is therefore not only safe but also compliant.
More exciting job
Should infrastructure managers fear that automation will steal their jobs? Of course not. Thanks to automation, they get to concentrate on more interesting work. Repetitive tasks that add little value become a thing of the past. This gives you more time and resources to invest in innovation. Nevertheless, it’s still essential that system administrators are proficient with tools such as Puppet, Ansible, or Terraform so that they can help shape the automation — something they didn’t have the time for before. In the end, automation only makes the job more interesting . . .