Building An Autonomous Cloud With Azure Stack On-Premise

The amount of data being produced by today’s organizations is increasing all the time, making efficient and secure data storage and management a high priority for the enterprise.

 Many businesses store their data in the cloud or in their own data centers. Or if they have a hybrid cloud infrastructure, they may share data between a range of different solutions (i.e. public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise).

But as the amount of data continues to grow, so does the need for efficient data management to keep it safe from malicious attacks and to ensure the organization remains compliant with laws regarding privacy and information storage.

As discussed here, the solution to this problem is not to increase the time and manpower to manage all this data but to build an autonomous cloud to store it in, using Azure Stack technology. 

What is an autonomous cloud?

An autonomous cloud is a cloud database equipped with AI and machine learning capabilities that fully automate various routine management tasks such as tuning, backups, and security updates, going away with the need for human intervention.

 This capability removes the burden from overworked database administrators and ensures the tasks are performed on time and without human errors, which could affect performance and compromise the security of the database.

 A poorly performing database can affect employee morale and productivity and lead to customer frustration and loss of business. A database that isn’t secure can have even more serious repercussions than that, putting an organization at risk of data breaches, which could result in non-compliance, huge financial losses and damage to the organization’s reputation and brand.

So an autonomous cloud database that provides end-to-end automation for security, performance and error prevention is something every organization should be striving to achieve. 

Also read How Manufacturers Are Making Use of Cloud Computing

Features and benefits of an autonomous cloud

 An autonomous cloud database has the following features;

  • Self-management: Full automation of all management, monitoring and tuning processes.
  • Self-protection: In-built protection from both external and internal attacks.
  • Self-repair: Ongoing internal maintenance to prevent or significantly reduce downtime.

These unique features provide a number of benefits to enterprise including lower costs and higher productivity, better database performance, greatly reduced downtime, improved security and the elimination of costly human errors.

By reducing the need for human intervention, you can also reduce the number of IT staff required to manage the database, allowing you to downsize or alternatively, to redeploy key IT personnel to focus on more productive and profitable work. 

A stable, secure and well-tuned autonomous cloud is also the perfect environment for organizations to develop scalable business applications before migrating them to the public cloud. 

Building autonomy with Azure Stack   

Building autonomy into your database is relatively easy to achieve if you manage your hybrid cloud infrastructure with Azure Stack.

The Azure online marketplace is an excellent place to find products and services that provide AI/ML functionality. The thousands of data center management tools offered include a number that can be used to automate processes in your database to create an autonomous environment.

 Machine learning and AI algorithms can be used to automate storage and memory management and provide a self-tuning database. They can improve security by analyzing logged data and flagging unusual patterns and they can regularly patch, tune, back up and upgrade your system, all while it is fully operational.

Microsoft’s Azure Stack gives you the power and flexibility of Azure’s public cloud inside your own data center. It offers the benefits of a public cloud such as flexibility, speed to market and integration with next-gen technologies along with the security and control of a private data center.

With Azure Stack, you can quickly and easily migrate, manage and share data across workloads in your public, private and on-premise resources. It classifies and groups the resources in your system and allocates them the capacity they need, while also allowing you to import and run VMs (Virtual Machines) with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) plans. 

Azure Stack ensures security and compliance, maximize system performance and its consistent set of tools can help to accelerate the development of applications. 

Preparing for an autonomous future

The current rate of enterprise data generation is rapidly outpacing the ability of many organizations to handle it manually, ensuring that autonomous databases will be the clouds of the future.

Growing numbers of organizations are already migrating to the autonomous database model in order to enjoy the benefits of increased performance, better security and lower operating costs.

 If you believe in the power of automation and want to free up your own workforce from repetitive tasks that can be done a hundred times better by the system itself, then building an autonomous cloud with Azure Stack should be a definite tick on your organization’s to-do list for the coming year.

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Written By Luke Fitzpatrick

Luke Fitzpatrick has been published in Forbes, Yahoo! News and Influencive. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Sydney, lecturing in Cross-Cultural Management and the Pre-MBA Program. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.