Best Practices for Cloud Operations Management

Cloud adoption is accelerating in the post-Covid-19 world. Some of the accelerators of this growth have been:

• The need to enable remote working
• Reduce overhead costs
• Improve client servicing
• Strengthen competitive advantage

A Gartner report indicates that the Global Cloud Revenue has increased from $408 Billion in 2021 to $474 Billion in 2022. By 2025, more than 85% of organizations are expected to embrace a cloud-first approach to enable the execution of their digital strategies. Deployment of new digital workloads on cloud-native platforms is projected to increase from 30% in 2021 to 95% in 2025.

This adoption of a cloud-first approach has also led to 61% of enterprises experiencing up to a 25% increase in revenues.

This cloud-first principle also requires businesses to approach cloud adoption differently from when it was only an extension of the on-premises systems. Earlier, the focus was on the installation, management, and maintenance of the cloud. But now, businesses realize that they need cloud operations, or CloudOps, to leverage the benefits of the cloud in the cloud-first environment.

CloudOps for Efficiency and Flexibility

CloudOps enables the optimization of IT services, processes, tools, and workloads, in the cloud and encompasses activities such as:

• Device management
• Performance
• Security
• Network
• Compliance
• Software development

This ensures the smooth functioning of the underlying cloud infrastructure and its native applications. This improves business agility by increasing operational efficiency, availability, accessibility, and flexibility of the cloud infrastructure.

Best Practices for CloudOps

Monitoring and automation tools empower the CloudOps teams to optimize the cloud performance while tracking and managing the core metrics of the infrastructure. This must be performed continuously from the time of migrating to the cloud to ensure sustained performance optimization.

Some of the advantages of CloudOps include:

• Improved service delivery – By facilitating the automation and execution of critical system tasks, CloudOps enables increasing IT productivity, improving service delivery, and enhancing operational efficiency.
• Improved cloud availability – Scaling up or down cloud resources in real-time and deploying cloud assets based on need, monitoring data transfer, and automating request handling, ensure that the cloud services will be available consistently. This allows businesses to run applications and processes uninterrupted from anywhere, anytime.
• Improved data security – One of the core activities of CloudOps is improving security by identifying and sealing vulnerabilities, encrypting data, scanning for malware scans, patching applications, setting up firewalls, and threat detection. It also helps with compliance management.
• Enables disaster recovery – CloudOps can be relied on to restore data in case of any loss due to system failure. Automated backup and recovery of data from off-site servers guarantee business continuity.

While these are the good aspects, CloudOps also must be implemented well to avoid some challenges. Overprovisioning of assets and space that remain underutilized can lead to budget overruns that can be astronomical over time.

.The second challenge in cloud services is the high-cost businesses may incur due to unexpected cost fluctuations.

The third challenge is data security. Despite the cloud engineering platforms offering data protection, businesses may be vulnerable to breaches and attacks due to being accessed remotely.

It is important to implement some best practices for cloud operations management to overcome these challenges.

Best Practices for CloudOps

Best Practice #1 Create a Deployment Plan: Create a structured plan for cloud deployment factoring in your business needs, cloud architecture, system network, and operations sequence. This will ensure a smooth deployment of applications without disrupting operations or causing outages.

Best Practice #2 Cloud Process Automation: Identify frequently recurring processes such as backup and network scanning. Automate these processes to minimize human intervention. This will free up your resources by decreasing their workload and enable them to focus on business-critical operations and innovation.

Best Practice #3 Provision for Redundancy: Cloud can also fail, and so, do not depend on a single server or application layer. Since core processes may be affected even by simple operations such as a software update and lead to disruption of service, design a multilayered architecture to provide for redundancy and duplicate the critical components. This will ensure service availability in case of any service disruption in the primary system.

Best Practice #4 Set Appropriate Limits for Resources: While the cloud does mean freedom, there can be hidden costs. Understand the contract and provision based only on what your system requires. Tracking the processes is a good way to assess your computing needs during peak and off-peak periods. This will help you to opt for the resources you require even during peak periods.

Best Practice #5 Monitor Costs: The cloud promises cost-efficiency along with flexibility and accessibility. However, Yet, businesses may incur high expenses due to overprovisioning and underutilization of resources, inefficient architecture, or not tracking cloud unit costs. These are some of the metrics that should be monitored as part of the CloudOps Management.

Is your Cloud Infrastructure optimized for Performance, Security, and Cost?

Indium for Cloud Operations Management Solution

Indium Software is a cutting-edge cloud solution provider with an experienced team that has expertise in cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. In addition to facilitating migration to the cloud, we can also help businesses derive the highest benefits by implementing a robust Cloud Operations Management Solution. This will be based on an understanding of the business goals of the organization, their business processes, governance and security policies, and their peak and off-peak requirements.