Using Self-Service Environment Blueprints to Maximise Productivity of Remote Teams
Lab as a Service (LaaS) providers offer three compelling capabilities that make the solution ideal for a remote workforce: self-service, automation and orchestration, and frictionless governance. These capabilities empower users to gain secure access to infrastructure in a timely manner using a process that is repeatable and scalable without direct IT interaction.
Self-service capabilities are essential for solving the bottleneck issue. Providers must offer an intuitive, user-friendly platform populated with prebuilt environments. Each environment includes a pre-configured set of applications, hardware, and services. Users should reserve these pre-built environments to avoid conflicting requests and execute them on the fly. This self-service option allows admins to focus on back-end processes with near-zero touch provisioning.
Automation is a vital component of IT orchestration. Lab as a Service automates the provisioning process for IT, helping them with systems management tasks like deploying patches, updates, and configurations, as well as receiving network alerts.
Organisations need the ability to secure a provisioning platform using authentication and security controls, such as role-based access control (RBAC). The ability to view, configure and allocate group access for the entire inventory is essential. Understanding resource utilisation can help admins understand where to balance workload to ensure optimal usage.
Some providers offer these key elements specific to a tightly integrated stack aligned with their respective ecosystem. While this may work for users with a homogeneous stack requirement, it limits organisations from adopting a hybrid or best-of-breed approach when selecting optimal components.
This Quali whitepaper will address the challenges for labs and testing environments that have grown increasingly impactful.
Lab Orchestration & Automation | Cloudshell Brochure | Contact us
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