Automation emerged as a central talking point in the cloud ecosystem last week after Mesosphere Inc. announced that it nabbed a $73 million investment from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Inc. and a group of half a dozen other big-name backers. The capital will help finance the development of new features for its namesake orchestration framework, which promises to dramatically reduce the amount of manual work involved in operating a large data center.

Mesosphere DCOS hides the complexity of the hardware on which it’s running behind a relatively straightforward API that enables applications to request additional resources whenever they have to scale. The mechanism removes the need for an administrator to handle the provisioning process, according to the startup, while doing away with much of complex componentry that has historically been required to support the human element. As a result, its platform can potentially make a data center both more efficient and easier to manage in one stroke.

The catch is that every application an organization wishes to migrate onto Mesosphere DCOS has to be adapted for its novel operating model, which is a time-consuming chore for customers with upwards of dozens of workloads to move. As a result, some companies are turning to other platforms as part of their data center modernization initiatives. Among them is Intralinks Holdings Inc., a publicly-traded provider of collaboration services that last week acquired Verilume Inc. to help ease the management of its infrastructure.

The automation startup has created a platform that makes it possible to deploy OpenStack and Hadoop in a matter of minutes. All an administrator has to do is prepare the hardware on which their future private cloud will run and specify how much resources should be provisioned. Once the deployment is up and running, Verilume makes it possible to regulate which users can utilize what part of the environment through a dedicated tenant management console.

Google Inc.’s public cloud now provides the ability to centrally control usage as well thanks to new access control functionality that was added against the backdrop of Mesosphere and Intralinks’ announcements. An organization can individually set permissions for every employee to ensure that they are only able to interact with the off-premise applications absolutely necessary for their work. The functionality should come particularly handy for customers in regulated industry like healthcare that don’t want, say, a member of the HR department accidentally viewing confidential patient records.

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