How CSP Automation can make your Business more Agile
Every Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) gets to the point where certain manual processes limit business growth and efficiency. At that point, it comes down to two choices: hire more hands to manage an increasing customer base or increase automation of your services.
Although businesses usually can’t help but hire more staff as the company grows, if CSPs really want to realize true business agility, they must focus on automating every aspect of their tools and processes.
In this piece, we’ll discuss the benefits of implementing a full-scale CSP automation, from provisioning and cloud procurement to customer self-service and billing.
What is Cloud Automation
Cloud automation refers to the tools and processes an organization uses to reduce manual tasks related to managing and provisioning cloud computing workloads and IT infrastructure (software, storage resources, servers, network devices, etc). An organization’s IT team can implement cloud automation to the public, hybrid, and private cloud environments.
Pros of Automation
Managing Complex Billing Inquiries
Effortless billing breakdowns can be automated, keeping your company’s inboxes clear of cost-related inquiries.
This allows your staff to dedicate their time to higher-value activities like upselling or cross-selling and managing more complex requests. Data shows that 59% of most established IT organizations can reassign engineers to higher-value tasks because of cloud automation.
Market Agility
Market agility is the ability of a business to respond rapidly to disruptions and opportunities. As a CSP, the ability or inability to make rapid decisions can make or break your business. Research shows that agile organizations are 2 times more likely to achieve top-quartile performance in revenue than average brands (55% vs 22%).
With the right CSP automation platform, you can achieve market agility for your service to respond quickly to ever-changing customer needs. For instance, CSP automation allows you to set up and sell to clients within hours. This is crucial for ramping up your business growth. Clients can also add numerous vendor services besides your core service, which ensures that they stay agile in a flexible and growing market.
That’s not all, an agile service via automation enables you to target customers with specialized needs as your business grows.
Customer Self-Service
By allowing clients to manage, provision, and buy cloud products themselves through a fully customized Marketplace, including downgrading and upgrading their cloud services, the CSP’s involvement evolves into mainly a supervisory one. This helps in keeping up with rapid growth in customers and cloud subscriptions.
Streamlined Workflows
CSP automation platforms can help you streamline workflows as well as provide your internal team with the information and tools they require to sell, quote, bill, audit services, and procure. This is inclusive of Microsoft Azure and Office 365.
Automation can also combine product configuration, sales quotes, order management, pricing, and contract life-cycles into a single activity as simple as completing a text field or clicking a button.
Scalability
Scalable systems can reduce or increase business capacity, functionalities, and resources available. As a CSP, trying to run a scalable service manually is draining and near impossible.
However, with a CSP automation platform, you gain access to a flexible infrastructure that’s customizable and enables you to respond to specific business and customer scale needs right away. Automation also allows you to provide a scalable cloud system for customers that offers various benefits crucial to sustaining business growth.
How to Implement Automation
Thanks to technological advancements and more adoption of automation by companies, users can now automate more tasks than ever before. It’s not an exaggeration to say most processes or workflows can be automated with the right dedication and knowledge — at least to some extent. Here are some guidelines for how to implement these automation strategies.
1. Take Advantage of Cloud Orchestration
To implement automation as effectively as possible you must undertake cloud orchestration, which is the coordination and arrangement of cloud automation resulting in a consolidated workflow/process. In cloud automation, a single task is automated, but in cloud orchestration, multiple tasks are combined into workflows.
Therefore, with cloud orchestration, you can configure the resources required for all automated tasks to run and combine automated workflows.
2. Know the Right Things to Automate
Identifying what your organization should automate and what it shouldn’t is vital. Repetitive processes that are not time-sensitive are the best automation candidates.
However, ensure you understand everything you need to know about your cloud environment before automating more business-vital tasks. Poor planning and inefficient automated processes on the cloud can be disastrous for both CSPs (they stand to lose customers) and their clients, especially brands that handover vital business data to their service provider.
Cloud automation is vital for business growth, sustainability, and agility. You can increase your market agility and scalability, manage complex billing inquiries, and streamline your workflows easily via CSP cloud automation.
Get to know the interworks.cloud platform
The interworks.cloud platform offers end-to-end automation and provisioning covering all of the above bases, which will help you manage and quickly deploy or expand your cloud business. To get started with cloud automation or learn more about how interworks.cloud can help you grow your cloud business, get in touch with us to request a free demo.
