Autonomous cloud addresses cost and performance issues

The time consuming and manual processes involved with deploying and operating workloads in the cloud has traditionally led to inaccuracies and spiralling costs. Automation and infrastructure service provider Ultima is today launching Autonomous Cloud to help businesses radically improve their cloud provisioning and Business as Usual (BAU) activities.

To effectively operate workloads in the cloud, many repetitive and manual processes are involved such as sizing, load balancing, deploying, patching, and monitoring and management. Whilst necessary, these are often fraught with human errors leading to delays with the workload’s availability and even security vulnerabilities. 

By automating the maintenance, security and support requirements through Ultima’s Autonomous Cloud, the benefits of the cloud can be delivered without the operational pain points many companies have been experiencing. Different levels of service are available on a monthly subscription basis to suit every organisation’s needs, and Ultima estimates most will experience a 43% reduction in operational costs using this innovative automated service.

Autonomous Cloud will also help lower carbon emissions and reduce a business’ environmental impact through innovative renewable energy purchasing and Ultima’s commitment to net zero carbon emissions for operations.

Scott Dodds, CEO, Ultima explains, “The long-term cost savings and innovation opportunities that cloud promised have not materialised, as many companies have struggled with escalating costs for support, maintenance and security, as well as spiralling licensing fees. The cloud is a very complex, ever-evolving suite of products. Autonomous Cloud will change the market by simplifying cloud ownership and operations to deliver what the cloud was meant to be.Not only will IT teams have more time and energy to focus on strategic IT issues and innovation, they will have 43% of their cloud budgets they can refocus elsewhere.”

Richard Ellis, Small, Medium & Corporate Leader Microsoft UK, comments, “Through Autonomous Cloud, Ultima is helping mid-sized organisations to transition effectively to the cloud, enabling them to reduce costs whilst optimising business performance. With leadership and support built on top of Microsoft Azure, customers can have the confidence that their individual requirements will be met, and all management and security issues will be addressed effectively.” 

As a component of Autonomous Cloud, Ultima has also developed a specific tool to help small-to-medium sized customers who host their environments on-premises. In the space of a day, this add-on sets up a new Azure environment, incorporating best practice via an orchestration platform and then migrates your current environment to the new platform so you can begin work immediately.

Autonomous Cloud is available on a three-tier level of service basis, providing different levels of support based on each user’s cloud environment and operational requirements. These services all provide access to improvements in support, reporting and billing in real-time through a ServiceNow portal. Customers can benefit from 24/7 support, whether that be issues with a backup or logging a ticket.

The ‘advanced’ level of service will dramatically reduce the need for human intervention around business as usual activities, reducing many repetitive tasks. Its ServiceNow portal logs ticketing requests, but also provides a service catalogue of tasks that can be automated. The platform automatically reports on security issues and uses machine learning to analyse trends and create alerts when anomalies occur. There is also automatic patching on the platform which reduces the overall threat footprint. 

Working in partnership with the customer, the ‘ultimate’ level of service continually analyzes expenditure and usage, detecting idle services and optimising licensing to improve performance. Its self-driven provisioning will provide governance around the deployment of new services by scanning the environment and on-boarding new services automatically, reducing the process to a day