---
title: The 4 C’s of Infrastructure Automation
description: Infrastructure automation can improve many aspects of your DevOps process. But you need the right solution for the job.
image: https://blog.quali.com/hubfs/Blog%E2%80%94The%204%20Cs%20of%20%20INFRASTRUCTURE%20AUTOMATION-1.png
---

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### The 4 C’s of Infrastructure Automation

# The 4 C’s of Infrastructure Automation

![header-picture](https://blog.quali.com/hubfs/Blog%E2%80%94The%204%20Cs%20of%20%20INFRASTRUCTURE%20AUTOMATION-2.png "header-picture")

**Author:**  
Sean Harris

**Published:**  
March 03, 2021

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Could your company curb cloud costs if you had the correct platform? Would you be capable of creating complex cloud environments quickly if you weren’t constrained by company conventions?

Now that I’ve captured your concentration, can we consider the 4 C’s of infrastructure automation?

Benefits of the 4 C’s for Your Business

COST

Cost is king for any business—more specifically, operating costs. There’s no shortage of ways your business can significantly reduce cloud costs with the right infrastructure automation platform.

Visibility over the use of cloud resources allows IT to make ongoing improvements in their allocation. With [CloudShell Colony](https://www.quali.com/products/cloudshell-colony/), for example, IT can automatically tag cloud usage and trace cloud spend back to business unit and/or project. Greater visibility over resource consumption and cloud spend can inform decision making regarding business-wide cloud resources.

The end user of the environment can set a pre-determined time frame for use of the environment, then it is automatically torn down when the resource is no longer needed. This gives developers an allotted time frame for the use of a specific environment, mitigating infrastructure sprawl and subsequent inflation of cloud costs.

COMPLIANCE

Your infrastructure automation platform should help IT teams maintain industry compliance standards, as well as internal compliance protocols. While infrastructure automation platforms aren’t exactly monitoring tools for compliance, they provide the features necessary to make that job more manageable for operations teams.

IT teams need the flexibility to configure “fully-baked” environment templates that meet the necessary compliance guidelines and deliver them quickly and securely to the DevOps teams that need them. Using role-based access controls (RBAC) and single sign-on (SSO) features, IT teams can maintain control over cloud environments, and the sensitive data they contain, while allowing developers self-service access only to those environments they need.

COHESION

IT teams are focused on governance, control, processes, and policies—which can impede accelerated innovation. DevOps teams, on the other hand, are concentrated on delivering software and updates quickly and efficiently. This can create a bottleneck in the provisioning of environments and sometimes encourages rogue behavior such as [shadow IT](https://blog.quali.com/blog/what-lurks-in-the-shadows-automate-your-infrastructure-to-slay-shadow-it) for those unable to wait.

By providing reusable, pre-configured (and IT approved) environment blueprints that developers can access in minutes through a self-service interface, infrastructure automation platforms can tear down these barriers between teams and speed the race to production.

CONSUMPTION

The consumption of cloud resources can be increasingly costly as an organization grows and experiences greater need for cloud environments. It can be even more costly if IT teams lose sight of how much cloud they’re consuming and by whom.

Infrastructure automation solutions like CloudShell provide the features, insight, and visibility required to manage cloud resource consumption. Automatic decommissioning of environments when they are no longer needed virtually eliminates infrastructure sprawl and the exponential inflation of costs associated with it.

As an extension of gaining efficiency in cloud spend, IT teams have the added advantage of auto-tagging of cloud environments, so every dollar spent can be pegged to the business unit consuming the associated resources. This gives the business the data they need to analyze utilization to better allocate resources.

CONCLUSION

Infrastructure automation can improve many aspects of your DevOps process. But you need the right solution for the job. You can gain speed, efficiency, and cost savings regardless of your goals or requirements.

If you’re looking for a single solution that can achieve all the things we’ve talked about here, request a demo of CloudShell Colony.

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- Posted by Sean Harris on March 03, 2021
- About Author:

 Topics: [DevOps](https://blog.quali.com/blog/topic/devops), [Automation](https://blog.quali.com/blog/topic/automation), [colony](https://blog.quali.com/blog/topic/colony), [ci/cd pipeline](https://blog.quali.com/blog/topic/ci-cd-pipeline), [infrastructure automation](https://blog.quali.com/blog/topic/infrastructure-automation)

By Sean Harris - 03 March, 2021

#### 4 Major Business Problems Solved by Infrastructure Automation

[![read more](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/685080/IMG-TurboSodium/Sodium%20v2/blog/arrow-recent-blog-post.png "read more")](https://blog.quali.com/blog/4-major-business-problems-solved-by-infrastructure-automation)

By Pascal Joly - 03 March, 2021

#### Infrastructure Automation at Scale: Blueprinting vs. Terraform

[![read more](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/685080/IMG-TurboSodium/Sodium%20v2/blog/arrow-recent-blog-post.png "read more")](https://blog.quali.com/blog/environment-as-a-service-blueprinting-vs.-terraform)

By Sean Harris - 03 March, 2021

#### Why Infrastructure Automation Is Critical for Cyber Security

[![read more](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/685080/IMG-TurboSodium/Sodium%20v2/blog/arrow-recent-blog-post.png "read more")](https://blog.quali.com/blog/why-infrastructure-automation-is-critical-for-cyber-security)

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#### 4 Major Business Problems Solved by Infrastructure Automation

Every company and organization that develops software and applications needs environments. As they race toward innovating new products and...

[Read More](https://blog.quali.com/blog/4-major-business-problems-solved-by-infrastructure-automation)

 

#### Infrastructure Automation at Scale: Blueprinting vs. Terraform

\[This blog was originally published in November of 2019 and updated with new content in May of 2021.\] Whether you are a software architect,...

[Read More](https://blog.quali.com/blog/environment-as-a-service-blueprinting-vs.-terraform)

 

#### Why Infrastructure Automation Is Critical for Cyber Security

Revelations about the recent SolarWinds hack have highlighted the evolving sophistication and growing effectiveness of cyber attacks,...

[Read More](https://blog.quali.com/blog/why-infrastructure-automation-is-critical-for-cyber-security)

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