Organizations across every industry are looking to automation to give their business a competitive advantage. In many cases, automation is already underway with multiple grassroots efforts. Automation is the cornerstone that allows IT to provide consumable infrastructure for development and application teams inside your organization. Automation is also key to reducing toil and having engineering and operations teams focus on important work and driving your business into the future. However, for many, getting started with Automation can seem like a daunting task, and prioritizing where to start can be a difficult decision.

In today's race to the cloud, companies often take the path of least resistance, or "lifting and shifting" existing apps without modification. Yet, to maximize gains from a cloud migration, it is frequently preferable to update workloads to leverage cloud native capabilities. This guided technical demo progresses through seven different means of replatforming and refactoring an application, illustrating the pros and cons of each architecture.

This briefing gives your organization the opportunity to better understand the considerations for building a software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture. SDDC is a foundational element to all cloud services (public and private) and has implications for cost optimization and modern application support.

Mid-market service providers are faced with numerous operations challenges every day. Network rollout, new services and ever-tightening budgets are driving operators to find new solutions, particularly in the area of automation. But service automation and IT automation can be very different matters. Tools that work for data center rollouts may not work for deploying and managing new customer services. Operations managers, network planners and solution architects are asking: what tools are best for service automation, can we automate without a costly consulting project, how would automation affect my operation, could we support it, how can we get beyond CLI-based operations, and what are other mid-market service providers doing?