Cloud services are a critical investment that will reap significant rewards in terms of speed and value.
However, it doesn’t happen overnight. Businesses are promptly realizing that there is little to be gained from migrating their set of applications to the cloud as quickly as possible and calling it a day.
They need to build a cloud environment that can scale — measurably, predictably — without significant changes; an environment that can support all their IT workloads with ease and safety. Additionally, this also means adopting new security architectures and processes to protect your cloud workloads.
To leverage the myriad advantages that cloud management brings to your organization, you need to take note of potential roadblocks. Here are four common cloud management issues that warrant your attention, along with strategies to minimize their impact.
Challenge: Cost
Cloud costs can quickly spin out of control, especially when departments outside central IT add to the organization’s overall cloud footprint. It is especially unattractive for organizations if a multi-cloud strategy results in uncontrollable costs, given that one of the key benefits of the cloud is the prospect of reducing expenses.
Factors such as inflation affecting IT categories and cloud services have led to price hikes among hyperscalers. Adding to the concerns, unexpected costs have arisen due to vendor licensing changes, the elimination of cloud discounts, and the repercussions of pandemic-driven cloud adoption. Enterprises are also struggling to track and forecast usage, particularly when utilizing multiple public cloud providers, where integration and other factors can result in unanticipated fees.
Solution: Capacity Planning & Cost Optimization
Fortunately, there are tools and cost optimization practices that can help eliminate unnecessary spending. Cost optimization also helps organizations strike a balance between cloud performance and expenditure.
For example, with capacity planning, you can choose the right cloud resources for your workload. Compute instances are available in a wide array of configurations to meet the unique processing, memory, storage, and performance needs of each application. You can also leverage cloud cost monitoring instruments to analyze your past spending and forecast your cloud expenses for the future. An advanced alerting system allows you to set benchmarks to notify you when you exceed expected spending thresholds — you can examine the root cause of an anomaly, preventing unexpected costs and adhering to your planned budget.
Other actions you can take to mitigate cloud costs include preventing cloud sprawl by decommissioning unused resources, strategically caching storage, running workloads in regions with cheaper computing costs, and restricting cloud access to experienced personnel for better cost management.
Challenge: Cyberattacks
Cybercriminals frequently focus on cloud-based networks due to their general accessibility from the public internet.
Given that multiple companies often share the same Cloud Service Provider (CSP), attackers can replicate a successful cyberattack on one target to gain access to numerous others. Furthermore, cloud-based infrastructures are often inadequately secured, a vulnerability that malicious hackers are well aware of and adept at exploiting. The potential for losing valuable data, whether through human error, natural disasters impacting physical servers, or intentional attacks seeking to destroy data, poses a significant threat to any company. The decision to transfer business-critical data to the cloud exacerbates these security concerns, as organizations may find it challenging to access affected servers on-site.
Solution: Security Protocols
Successful cloud adoption depends on implementing adequate measures to defend against modern-day cyberattacks. Whether you operate in a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment, there are numerous cloud security solutions available for maintaining business continuity in the event of cyberattacks.
For instance, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) provides a comprehensive security orchestration solution that automates threat monitoring, detection, and response in cloud-based environments. SIEM technology utilizes artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies to correlate log data across multiple platforms and digital assets. This enables your IT teams to effectively apply their network security protocols, allowing them to respond quickly to potential threats.
Consideration should also be given to Identity and Access Management (IAM) tools and services, which enable the deployment of policy-driven enforcement protocols for all users attempting to access both on-premises and cloud-based services. This involves creating digital identities for all users, actively monitoring them, and imposing restrictions when necessary, during all data interactions.
Challenge: Poor Performance
As organizations transition to cloud-based infrastructures, they grapple with ensuring consistent and reliable performance across diverse workloads.
Variability in performance can stem from factors such as network latency, resource contention, and the shared nature of cloud resources. Ensuring optimal performance becomes even more complex when dealing with multi-cloud environments, where interoperability and coordination between different cloud providers present additional hurdles. Resource contention also surfaces when multiple applications vie for the same underlying resources, affecting the overall system responsiveness.
Solution: Proactive Performance Monitoring
You can start by conducting a comprehensive performance analysis, identifying bottlenecks and latency issues within the cloud infrastructure. There are also many advanced monitoring tools in the market that enable real-time visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and network latency.
By using a third-party monitoring service to check for performance issues, you can promptly receive alerts indicating the nature of the problem and its impact on your cloud deployment. This enables your team to address the issue immediately, avoiding the need to spend time on discovery and diagnosis.
Challenge: Skills Gap
At the infrastructure level, the shortage of professionals skilled in cloud architecture, virtualization, and network management significantly throws a wrench into the design of scalable and resilient cloud environments.
This skills deficit leads to vulnerabilities as organizations struggle to implement robust cloud security measures. The scarcity of expertise in Cloud-based practices also makes it difficult for companies to effectively manage their cloud assets, as they simply can’t find trustworthy people to manage them.
Solution: Training & Third-Party Support
The key priority should revolve around building a team with unique skills, in addition to continuing to upskill and reskill IT teams to work in cloud environments. This means finding ways to attract and retain individuals who comprehend cloud architecture, service platforms, data migration, and various other aspects of the cloud.
Many organizations find support essential in the initial stages of the flywheel process and choose to delegate this responsibility to a knowledgeable third party, capable of training future trainers within their organization. Plus, a skilled partner can contribute to establishing a culture of agility and ongoing learning and improvement, ensuring a focus on business innovation and maximizing the value of the cloud for the business.
RELY ON YARDSTICK TECHNOLOGIES TO OPTIMIZE CLOUD MANAGEMENT
Teaming up with a managed services provider can help you achieve various objectives, both in IT and throughout the entire business. These achievements can be simplification, enhanced cost control, and accelerated growth and innovation.
At Yardstick, our services seamlessly integrate with your existing IT systems, applications, provisioning, cloud security, and more, delivering a proactive solution for your operating environment. We strive to boost efficiency and reduce errors—an essential element for effective cloud management. With a dedication to flexibility, adaptability, and efficient management, Yardstick Technologies is well-positioned to address the evolving needs of your organization and it’s cloud environment.