#crushingcloudautomationsilos

When explaining product value it’s better to focus on differentiation and results achieved. The trouble is, from a marketing and social out-reach perspective, claims of value are drowned in a tsunami of online noise and similar claims from competitors and thanks to ChatGPT the time between a differentiated new idea and parity is just days. 

However, when it comes to Quali’s Torque platform, the proof of differentiated value is best realized when seeing and using it. The focus was always on the future state of cloud infrastructure and it is from this position that Torque was architected and developed.

Understandably my CEO becomes concerned when I endeavor to explain the basics of how the Torque platform works. Technical IT people want more detail and IT leaders want less – a lot less. 

This short article attempts to hit the middle-ground. Providing a brief overview of how Torque works and how it can do what it does because once you understand the how then the why it does it and what it can do for you will become very clear. 

After a lifetime in the IT Ops and Software Development space, it’s a rare occurrence to find something truly differentiated, especially when it coincides at a time of greatest need.  For Quali’s Torque platform the stars have aligned. IT infrastructure is insanely complex. IaC is hard to manage and scale, expertise is expensive and growing increasingly scarce, infrastructure usage is in constant state of change with AI workloads changing how cloud is used and managed. It's no longer about delivering infrastructure, it's about ensuring the infrastructure adapts to support increasingly diverse workloads. 

To achieve this, infrastructure silo's need to be flattened, integrated and normalized allowing organizations to become agile and allow businesses to scale on-demand and keep up with the increasing demand for cloud services. Throwing more people at it will only make things worse because the problem needs addressing at the source by something that removes hybrid cloud infrastructure complexity, subsumes and leverages existing automation and uses intelligence to manage a complex cloud infrastructure issue that is only going to get worse. 

The Problem: Traditional Infrastructure Automation Platforms Create Silos, Not Solutions 

Cloud management platforms (CMP’s) were introduced when cloud was emerging.  These platforms are now outdated and ill prepared to deal with new and emerging infrastructure challenges. They are the ‘hot-pants’ made for Disco. An era that has long gone. 

Do CMP’s still have a role? Sure, there’s always enough legacy to warrant continued siloed use and when this starts to dry up, the CMP’s will either get acquired by IT companies who need something that meet the needs of a specific cloud and/or infrastructure type or just fade away to a fanfare of increasingly unbelievable claims of relevance. 

The CMP’s that remain are automation siloes demanding automation to be defined within their own platforms, assuming that every other automation system is subordinate to theirs. The result is more complexity, more skills, increased cost, more layers of administration, and more headaches for IT teams with each automation layer disconnected, creating inefficiencies, disparate policies and governance risks.  In a world of AI workloads that demand adaptive intelligence to manage them, it’s not the time to chase after them with static policies and linear automation workflows. 

Skills and Complexity: Each platform adds more skills requirements and complexity, which leads to higher costs and steeper learning curves. 

Troubleshooting and Remediation: As automation is executed without understanding the bigger picture, troubleshooting becomes a nightmare. Issues must be escalated to experts who often have little insight into what the subordinate automations are doing.

Inefficient Operations: Without a holistic view, IT operations are slowed down, creating bottlenecks that impact business outcomes. This results in disconnected tools, more layers of policy, and no cohesive management structure. 

The Solution: Full Automation Discovery and Normalization with AI 

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has become the heart of everything infrastructure for modern software development, empowering coders to create infrastructure as part of their software delivery objectives. The challenge is this makes it a tool for specialists, but what if IaC could be leveraged more extensively and made available to IT professionals without coding or infrastructure experience? 

To achieve this Quali Torque takes a fundamentally different approach to hybrid cloud management, leveraging AI to automate discovery, normalization, creation, delivery and optimization of infrastructure. Rather than creating more silos, Torque fully integrates all existing automation, regardless of platform or complexity.