Click to learn more about author Tim Mullahy.

Do you have a data center lifecycle management strategy in place? Have you laid out established, clear-cut management procedures and processes? Do you have a regular maintenance schedule?

Good. You’ve taken the first steps. Now how do you ensure that you and your staff stick to those schedules?

Managing a data center isn’t exactly a walk in the park, after all. Especially where larger facilities are concerned, data centers are extremely complex. It’s easy to stumble when seeing to their maintenance; easy to forget a small task here or to postpone a scheduled event there.

Unfortunately, it’s also easy to mess up the time and date of planned server maintenance – or to mess up the maintenance itself – and wind up with egg on your face. That’s exactly what happened with Vodafone Australia in January. Clients of the company suffered a nearly three-hour outage due to an error during planned work on its network.

Not exactly the sort of thing you want to see happen to your business, right?

So how do you avoid this? How do you prevent what happened with Vodafone from happening to your own business? How can you ensure that your maintenance is on time, and runs as planned – without any outages caused by employee error?

I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that you can’t reduce the likelihood of an outage to zero. There will always be a small chance that someone will mess something up, that someone will fail to follow an approved procedure or bungle an update.

The good news is that you can minimize the risk of this occurring through cloud automation. This allows you to offload non-essential workflows and processes to an automated cloud platform. These include:

● Server and resource provisioning.
● Application rollout
● System configuration
● Load balancing
● Scheduling
● System monitoring

By automating the processes above, you can keep your team free to handle more critical tasks, such as patching, maintenance, and data security. You can ensure your entire facility runs more efficiently and effectively. And perhaps most importantly, you can ready your data center for the now-extensive usage of cloud services both within your facility and without.

“Today, there are entire organizations that are born from a cloud model which resides within the data center,” writes Data Center Knowledge’s Bill Kleyman. “Looking ahead, new cloud and data center control systems will only continue to become more critical. As more users utilize content delivered directly from cloud resources, the data center will need to be able to handle the influx of new demand.”

By making your facility more efficient through automation – by incorporating the cloud at every level of your facility – you can ensure that it will be more than capable of just that.