The heart of automation is about reducing the intricacies of deploying and managing complex services and applications. Its about translating manual processes into automated workflows that deliver significant value to your business while allowing your staff to focus on more strategic projects.

LightEdge is an enterprise-grade service provider and consulting company that is focused on the needs of small and medium-sized business with sophisticated IT requirements.  They deliver a broad range of product and service offerings that include comprehensive hosted as well as on premise-based solutions.  Their full-service approach delivers infrastructure, network and expertise so their customers have peace of mind. Watch this video to learn more.

For the past ten years, LightEdge Solutions has focused on providing exceptional local IT and cloud services to its core customer base in the Midwestern United States. With a client base of small to medium businesses, LightEdge needed to create consistent environments that customers could freely use as building blocks to scale or develop complex architectures.  The challenge was how to balance the need for flexibility and consistency with customers' desire for rapid provisioning of services.  "Cisco gave us the tools to assemble environments that aren't possible with more rigid solution providers in the industry," says Mike McHenry, Vice President of Product Cloud Architecture.

Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite provides the agility and control LightEdge needs to deliver leading-edge service to their clients. With Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite, LightEdge and its customers can reduce time managing their cloud environments through the role-based self-service portal which provides visibility into each user's services.  The ability to invoke lifecycle actions from the portal also reduces time spent troubleshooting cloud resources.

Provisioning infrastructure is fast and consistent with the built-in workflow designer component of Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite.  Tasks that typically took up to a full week, such as deploying additional compute resources, can now be accomplished in less than 30 minutes.  The hybrid cloud component to the solution "gives us a secure and reliable way to transition customers to the public cloud, which helps reassure companies that their mission-critical workloads are in good hands, says McHenry.

LightEdge has been able to significantly reduce the complexity of their environment through unified management while decreasing deployment times for complex environments from 60 days to a couple of hours. "We're excited about our continued partnership with Cisco and the future of Cisco solutions," says McHenry.  "We see the next step as the ability to consistently move and replicate policies.  Every minute we save through automation allows us to keep pace with growth."

At its heart, automation is about allowing your business to keep pace in the digital world.