A platform controller accelerates service innovations by reducing complexity in development, providing resource configurations automatically, rationalizing design tasks, reducing the time for regression testing, resolving friction between agile and waterfall processes and automating the and providing test beds on demand. For regulated industries, it offers the additional benefit of embedding compliance into the fabric of innovation, allowing businesses that require an authority to operate to navigate stringent requirements more effectively and accelerate the delivery of new, compliant services.
Faster Experimentation and Deployment
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Dependency Awareness The controller understands how new services interact with existing on-prem and cloud infrastructure. This allows for quicker identification of potential integration issues and faster setup of testing and staging environments, accelerating the development lifecycle.
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Automated Workload Distribution New services or features can be deployed to automatically the most suitable environment, on-prem for applications that require dedicated infrastructure and cloud platforms for micro-services. Separating these environments but presenting a unified interface allows development processes where multiple, feature oriented teams can rely on a single core system or data source. This eliminates manual provisioning and configuration, reducing deployment time and allowing teams to iterate more rapidly on new ideas.
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Continuous Audits for Governance, Risk and Compliance Integrating audit trails from the outset of service development ensures that new features adhere to internal policies and best practices. This proactive approach reduces the risk of compliance roadblocks later in the development process, allowing for faster release cycles.
Optimized Resource Utilization for Innovation
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Cost-Effective Experimentation By intelligently placing workloads, the controller allows enterprises to leverage cost-effective cloud resources for experimentation and initial deployments of innovative services without heavily impacting on-prem resources.
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Dynamic Scaling for New Services As new services gain traction, the controller can automatically scale their resources in the cloud based on demand, ensuring a smooth user experience without manual intervention. This agility allows enterprises to respond quickly to market opportunities.
Reduced Operational Overhead for Innovation Teams
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Abstraction of Infrastructure Complexity The controller handles the underlying infrastructure management, freeing up development and operations teams to focus on building and deploying innovative features rather than managing infrastructure silos.
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Self-Service Capabilities A well-designed controller can offer self-service portals for developers to provision resources and deploy applications within defined guardrails, further accelerating their ability to innovate independently.
Data-Driven Insights for Service Enhancement
- Continuous Auditing The audit trails and monitoring data collected by the controller can provide valuable insights into the performance, security, and compliance of new services in real-world conditions. This data can inform iterative improvements and future innovation efforts.
Delivery Automation in Regulated Industries (e.g., Finance, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals)
Regulated industries face stringent compliance requirements that often slow down innovation. A platform controller is a game-changer providing access to resource composites that embed security and compliance controls into the innovation process:
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Faster Time-to-Market for Compliant Services with “Compliance as Code” By automating compliance checks and enforcement through the controller, regulated enterprises can adopt a “compliance as code” approach. This integrates security and regulatory considerations early in the development lifecycle, reducing delays and rework associated with manual compliance reviews. This streamlines audits for faster approvals. The availability of continuous and automated audit data can significantly expedite regulatory reviews and approvals for new services, allowing them to reach the market faster.
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Automated Compliance and Governance The controller maps dependencies between service components and specific regulatory requirements tied to the underlying infrastructure. This allows for automated enforcement of compliance controls based on where workloads reside. In addition, it automates workload placement based on compliance. Certain sensitive workloads or data might need to reside on-premises to meet regulatory requirements. The controller automatically ensures these workloads are placed in compliant environments. And it allows for continuous audits for regulatory adherence by enabling on-demand and continuous audits that provide a real-time view of compliance status across the hybrid environment. This significantly reduces the burden of manual audits and the risk of non-compliance, allowing for faster innovation within regulatory boundaries.
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Enhanced Security and Data Governance Understanding dependencies helps identify potential security vulnerabilities across the hybrid infrastructure when deploying new services. The controller enforces security policies based on these dependencies. E.g. it automates workload placement for data sovereignty. For industries with strict data sovereignty requirements, the controller ensures data related to new services is automatically placed and processed in compliant geographic locations. And it provides comprehensive audit trails for accountability. Continuous audit logs provide a detailed history of all actions and resource configurations, crucial for demonstrating compliance to regulatory bodies and accelerating the approval process for new services.
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Increased Trust and Transparency The automated audit trails and compliance reporting provided by the controller offer greater transparency and build trust with regulators and customers. This creates a significant competitive advantage in regulated industries.