5 Best Practices to Manage your Cloud Computing Resources

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The cloud adoption rate is growing, but many businesses do not reach cloud maturity. An IDC survey reports that the cloud adoption rate increased more than 61% in 2016, but still, many adopters are yet to have a matured cloud. It also indicates that organizations with greater cloud maturity gain additional revenues and reduced costs significantly. A matured cloud is one that is managed, optimized, and repeatable. Only 31% of adopters have developed cloud strategies, and 22% have no cloud strategy at all! Cloud management is an essential part of the cloud service model. Many difficulties and challenges can be resolved with cloud management to fuel your success on the cloud. It can become complicated and excruciating if you fail to solve the problems the right way. Resolving cloud issues requires careful monitoring and extensive expertise to avoid pitfalls and form desirable outcomes. A well-managed cloud will reduce risks, reduce costs, and, most importantly, can help you reach the highest level of cloud maturity.

This article will guide you with five best cloud management practices that are essential to empower your cloud success.

  1. Compose a flexible cloud environment
    It is easier to achieve high resiliency faster in the cloud if you understand the components of a flexible cloud. The right way to build a flexible cloud is by following all the best practices approved by your cloud provider. You should follow the guidelines throughout all stages, such as configuration, design, deployment, management, and maintenance. One of the main things in the best practice checklist is to avoid any single point of failure. Deploy multiple instances of resources, services, and other components to expand them over different data centers. To understand the complexities of cloud management, it is crucial to design flexible cloud applications that can be configured to use multiple instances.
  2. Monitor your Cloud Services
    Cloud users shouldn’t sit back and relax after they have negotiated and signed the cloud SLA with the vendor to their satisfaction. You need to check upon and monitor your cloud services to make sure that your cloud vendor is providing the services and is living up to the tasks assured in the SLA. Make sure that your network performance meets your expectations. Another monitoring issue is bandwidth, which is a core component of a cloud solution. You may face a cloud bandwidth issue if you don’t plan appropriately for your bandwidth needs and monitor its usage. Cloud Management practices that careful aim at monitoring will help you identify and dodge security threats before they get out of control.

    Also Read – Top 5 Advantages of Cloud Computing in 2020

  3. Build a Cloud Security Strategy 
    Cloud security strategies will make a significant impact when an unforeseen disaster strikes. Strategize and plan for the risk, develop a risk mitigation plan, and prepare your employees to be able to respond effectively and deal with such issues quickly. You must have the right backup protection, disaster recovery plans, and other processes to maintain reliability. To empower cloud resources for its best use, while efficiently managing risk, an organization should build a comprehensive cloud security strategy that shall include:

    • Organization’s cloud computing needs for the future.
    • Possible security risks.
    • Assign responsibilities and accountability for cloud computing risks.
    • Existing IT security practices.
    • What all security is covered in the Service Level Agreement contract (SLA), i.e., provided by the cloud vendor.
    • Difference between present cloud security and the desired system.
    • Organization’s cloud computing needs for the future.Possible solutions for bridging any gaps to enhance security and compliance.
  4. Execute Automation Frameworks
    While implementing the best practices for cloud adoption, we mention automation and infrastructure as the focus of implementation. Structuring infrastructure, automated tools, and building a framework for every application is at the core of managing the cloud. Your goal should be to get each application deployed and implemented through the structural code. At the heart of development, the mantra is the Model View Controller (MVC) automation templates with a DevOps mentality for the new cloud environment. The aim is to have repeatable automation templates that can process operational administration. For instance, for your MVC, onboarding a new application team for the cloud platform should extract more than 90% of its code from GitHub and the other managed frameworks. The automation process allows your IT resources to focus work on the core business, which saves ample time and money. It will also improve reliability, high-availability, and efficiency and reduce cloud management errors.
  5. Build a Core Cloud Team
    All of the organizations of all sizes that are striving for cloud maturity should invest in a cloud expertise team. Building a Cloud-centric team is probably the most challenging cloud management practice, but also the most impactful one. This will initiate and monitor cloud management practices across all cloud applications. It will make cloud management simpler and more efficient, starting from design and deployment to maintenance and management. Try to put together a team with real-world experience in cloud management. Build a team with diverse backgrounds like system administrators, network engineers, database administrators, and so on. Regular brainstorming sessions, training, experimentation, and other practices should supervise your core cloud team to reach the highest level of cloud maturity.

Conclusion

Managing your cloud is the single most important task your company will need over its next decade of adopting the cloud. Getting the best out of your cloud solution demands much more than just following a few best practices. If you have a framed cloud strategy and plan, then cloud management will be easier and more effective. Starting from deployment, design, management, and maintenance.

Since your clients rely on your business and your business relies on the cloud, you need to establish and follow the best of cloud management strategies to leverage the cloud, reduce its costs, enhance its agility, make it failure resistant and improve the customer experience. When your business attains the highest level of cloud maturity, your customers will thoroughly profit from the flexibility and agility of the cloud.

If you have any queries about optimizing your cloud performance for your business, then contact us today to help you out with your cloud management needs.