By Yashin Manraj, CEO, Pvotal Technologies
Businesses that want to become future-proof must invest in a scalable foundation while recognizing that scalability goes beyond supporting growth. When initiated effectively, scalability gives businesses the agility and flexibility needed to adapt and evolve as markets shift and new opportunities emerge.
However, scalability has its challenges, especially in today’s business landscape. Increasing scalability requires wrestling with new levels of complexity, and achieving it typically involves utilizing new technology solutions, which can introduce new risks to a business’s operations.
As today’s businesses seek to develop effective scaling strategies, they find automation a key component. Because automation has the potential to maximize the effectiveness of scaling without significantly increasing costs, businesses of any size can leverage it to empower the type of scaling needed to become future-proof.
The Value Automation Brings to Scaling Strategies.
Provisioning is a key challenge associated with scaling. As a business’s needs increase or decrease, the resources being utilized to support the system must be adjusted. This generally includes acquiring, configuring, and deploying resources.
Manual provisioning does not provide the level of performance needed for scaling in today’s business environment. It risks bottlenecks and errors as servers are set up, software is configured, and network settings are managed. By automating provisioning, however, businesses can achieve the speed, accuracy, and consistency required for effective scaling.
Automation can also be used to support scalability by being applied to performance monitoring. Automated systems can continuously track network usage and other key metrics to identify issues as they occur, allowing businesses to safeguard the stability of systems better as they scale.
Whereas human monitoring is generally reactive, automated systems can improve scaling capabilities by providing proactive monitoring. By integrating artificial intelligence, automated systems can provide predictive performance analysis, essentially identifying the signs that systems are likely to be affected in certain ways and deploying or requesting the resources needed to address new needs.
Software deployment is another key element of scaling that benefits significantly from automation. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems leverage automation to ensure stability and accessibility are not negatively impacted by software updates and deployment. Canary deployment strategies, which prevent unforeseen failures from code updates from impacting significant numbers of users, can also be supported and automated via CI/CD.
In each of these areas, automation helps to provide the resilience needed to support scaling effectively. Automated systems ensure bandwidth, storage space, server capabilities, and other system functionalities are properly allocated and provisioned when needs fluctuate.
The Value Automation Brings to Security Strategies.
Scaling business capabilities also means scaling business risks because, as businesses scale their resources, they commonly create a larger attack surface. Adding new components, supporting new users, and gathering new data all create new vulnerabilities that must be addressed.
Adopting automated processes for scaling promises to enhance security primarily by limiting human involvement. Human error is a key component in security failures, with reports showing it plays a role 74 percent of the time systems are breached. By automating key security processes, such as installing security patches and adjusting scaling limits, businesses can increase the likelihood that those processes will be handled with accuracy and timeliness.
Utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to eliminate the need for manual configurations is a strategy that can drive more secure scaling. IaC ensures infrastructure deployments are achieved in a consistent and repeatable way by defining them in code. IaC reduces a system’s attack surface by increasing consistency and empowering role-based access control (RBAC).
Automated processes are also immune to social engineering attacks, which have been shown to play a role in approximately 90 percent of attacks levied against online systems. By leveraging automation to decrease the need for manual processing, businesses can limit the authorizations they must provide for system management. By decreasing the number of gatekeepers, they decrease the number of gates that can be used to gain unauthorized access to their systems.
Incorporating automation into scaling strategies allows businesses of all sizes to maximize their capability while minimizing their costs, empowering them to establish and maintain a competitive edge in a constantly changing market that demands agility and flexibility. This approach helps best prepare businesses for whatever the future may hold.
Yashin Manraj, CEO of Pvotal Technologies, has served as a computational chemist in academia, an engineer working on novel challenges at the nanoscale, and a thought leader building more secure systems at the world’s best engineering firms. His deep technical knowledge from product development, design, business insights, and coding provides a unique nexus to identify and solve gaps in the product pipeline. The Pvotal mission is to build sophisticated enterprises with no limits that are built for rapid change, seamless communication, top-notch security, and scalability to infinity.