By 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today. – Gartner

The above statement shows the extent to which the cloud boom has revolutionized the IT industry and the shift in IT needs of businesses worldwide. Imagining a day without internet in today’s era is like imagining a day without breathing! Similarly, cloud will become an integral part of our lives in a very near future.

This cloud boom has charted a new path for the service providers for generating new streams of revenue. At present, they are having an opportunity when their client base is shifting from traditional or legacy IT services to new-age cloud services providing great revenue generating opportunities.

Now this is easier said than done. Selling cloud is not a cakewalk for someone new to it. You need to have multiple things in place – service orchestration, cloud billing management, inventory and infrastructure management, technical support and helpdesk management, sales and marketing management, ordering and marketplace management, reporting and data analysis, and customer lifecycle management to sell cloud. And, most importantly you need to have automation for managing all these operations.

Let’s see how you, a service provider, can capitalize on this opportunity with Microsoft Azure, the leading cloud platform and RackNap.

Microsoft Azure – A Brief Overview

Microsoft Azure is a flexible, open, enterprise grade and a fast growing cloud platform. Azure enables service providers to build, deploy and manage a wide range of services and apps via globally distributed data centers of Microsoft.

As per a new survey by Morgan Stanley, roughly 31 percent of the CIOs will be using Azure for IaaS, up from 12% and Microsoft Azure will capture more than 30% of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market share.

With such big proportion of market capture that the Microsoft Azure has, let’s see some of the key distinguishers that has helped Azure cloud surpass the traditional IT systems:

Get things done faster- With the variety of devices, OS, languages and framework that Azure aids you with, the work gets done super quickly.

Be available anytime, anywhere- With the entire world now getting connected via digitization, Azure helps one run applications and perform tasks from any part of the world, with its vast and expanded network.

Resource usage flexibility- The freedom of scaling up and down the resources and the costings associated with it, is one of the most remarkable features of working with Azure cloud.

Data Security- With the entire data and information being stored on the cloud server, Azure cloud ensures the complete data privacy and protection.

Leveraging existing IT resources- Without any major change in your existing IT infrastructure, Azure helps you integrate it with the cloud infrastructure, thus minimizing the hassles associated with migrations and change of resources.

Be smart with intelligent analytics- Azure helps you and your business take smart and intelligent business decisions by providing you with smart predictive tools to work upon.

Microsoft Azure Automation – What is it Required?

Service automation is the need of the day. When every organization in today’s world is shifting to cloud, a fast technology, the service providers selling cloud cannot rely on handling processes manually. They need completely automated mechanism for handling all the business processes involved, so as to get to market and deliver services faster and efficiently.

Thus, processes related to selling of Microsoft Azure services too need to be automated. A single automated platform is needed that can take care of the redundant tasks and can help the Azure provider have full control over the Azure Cloud that is being used by his client. The cloud business automation platform should be able to take care of:

Automatic provisioning of the Azure cloud in Azure panel, purchased from the marketplace.

Auto control scaling up and scaling down the resource usage and get the same implemented in the Azure panel simultaneously.

Auto control “stopping”, “restarting” and “terminating” the Azure Virtual Machine that is provisioned in the Azure Panel.

Provide manual control over “stopping”, “restarting” and “terminating” the Azure Virtual Machine that is provisioned in the Azure Panel.

Auto control the Azure billing such that failure of the payment for the extra used Azure resource bandwidth leads to the Virtual Machine termination from the Azure panel.

How RackNap enables Azure Automation?

Simply working in Azure Cloud is not sufficient. The current industry scenario and need, highly demand Azure cloud automation platform and RackNap does all the above and a lot more.

RackNap – A unified cloud services delivery and business process automation platform helps CSPs control and manage the complete Azure cloud provisioning, delivery and billing with automation along with managing the complete client lifecycle.

Here is a step-by-step video explaining how RackNap helps cloud service providers with Azure automation – provisioning, billing and management of complete customer lifecycle.

RackNap helps the cloud service providers and its buyers automate cloud in following 3 ways:

Azure Automation and Provisioning: RackNap facilitates automated Azure implementation and its provisioning in the Microsoft panel. Thus, without manual intervention, the Azure virtual machine and its defined resources that are purchased by the client, get provisioned in the client’s Microsoft Azure panel. This is accomplished with RackNap’s API integration with Azure API. Client Control on Azure Resources: With the help of RackNap, client enjoys complete control on his Virtual Machine. As per the fluctuating demands, client can easily scale up and scale down the cloud resources and thus save both – time as well as money. Moreover, with RackNap, cloud service providers need not worry about keeping track of client’s cloud usage. RackNap does this for them, by automatically allocating the scaled up resources and deleting the scaled down resources and Azure Virtual Machines, in case of non-payment, while also providing manual control to the system administrators to do so. Automated Azure Billing: RackNap helps cloud service providers automate the cloud billing cycle and billing of any bundled services purchased by their end clients. Thus, without any hassle of monitoring the multiple billing ledgers, cloud businesses can simply focus on maximizing their revenue as RackNap takes care of everything else. 🙂

To summarize, the current cloud era has undoubtedly revolutionized the global IT industry but with the fast pace of cloud adoption, it has become mandatory for the cloud service providers to have automation for managing cloud services delivery with an automation platform like RackNap to automate the repetitive manual tasks and maximize the business productivity and efficiency.

To know more, please go to Microsoft Azure Cloud Automation – Automation, orchestration, billing and delivery.

Reference:

https://mspoweruser.com/cio-surey-finds-microsoft-azure-will-overtake-amazon-aws-infrastructure-service/