Cloud Management and Strategies to get Cost Effective Cloud

Why is cloud management important?

The term Cloud management means making efficient use of cloud infrastructure resources and services. A well-structured cloud management strategy can help a company control and scale its infrastructure. Companies are expected to improve cloud computing performance, reliability, and make use of best cloud optimization practices.

There are multiple tools and platforms available for cost-monitoring, performance optimization, and monitor energy consumption. In the end, cloud management decisions solely depend on individual company’s goals and objectives, and there is no single solution that would work for everyone.

Cloud management goals and characteristics

Managing cloud resources is the biggest challenge that companies face with their cloud infrastructure. When the IT staff loses track of cloud resources, they might go unchecked throughout the organization which eventually grows into a huge problem. Unused or mismanaged resources can increase costs and create security problems, so IT staff needs governance policies and role-based permission to access controls in the company.

It starts with a proper cloud migration strategy that involves documentation and analysis to ensure that only necessary data and functions are moved off premises. Management platform tools can help throughout an application's lifecycle. Platforms help admins to manage all types of cloud activities, resources to control and monitor both internal and external services. Regular audits can keep resources in check. Third-party tools to help fine-tune company’s usage, performance, cost and business benefits.

Security management

Cloud security refers to the wide range of policies and strategies implemented to provide controls to protect data applications and cloud systems apps. With cloud web services, traffic is redirected to security cloud-first for filtration and only allows legitimate users to gain access. Any traffic that the security cloud does not approve gets blocked from getting to the server.

As security is an essential element of a cloud service it becomes a shared responsibility of cloud users to protect their data. Cloud security plans include secure back-up, configuration management, security dashboard, automated antivirus checks, improved logging and access management.

Cloud security challenges

Company does not have control over location of the data. Data breaches and incidents still occur even after updates in security and having firewall in their networks. Cloud administrators should test their infrastructure and have the latest security audits and reports. Cease access from insecure access control points.

Cost management

Cloud can get expensive if they are not managed from the beginning. There are various short-term and long-term cost optimization strategies available for cloud configurations that can help a company stick to their budget.

So it all starts with choosing the right provider depending on the requirement. There are different service packages to cater to different ways an application runs and utilizes resources. Each package has its own cost and management complexity. Consider the points mentioned below to find the right balance between costs and needs:

• Deduce how much redundancy your application needs

Low-cost strategy is to pick a hosting option that distributes workloads over multiple data centers within a region, but has the least amount of redundancy. Mirror workloads offers more redundancy but at a higher cost.

• Deduce the appropriate size and scale for your installation

Tools can help identify and choose appropriate size of initial installation. They can be used to predict future workload that would require scale-up.

• Minimize data movement

Cloud providers charge for a certain amount of data moved. If you move data frequently, then select the appropriate cloud services setup for that.

• Consider third-party tools

There are tools offered by the service provider. But consider third-party cost-management tools who offer better capabilities. They also work in multi-cloud infrastructure.

• Look to advanced technologies for assistance

Some users and experts believe artificial intelligence and machine learning can help reduce costs. But you should also consider integration and maintenance cost of that technology.

Cost management challenges

Usually, companies receive a detailed bill that includes information about different cloud costs. You might have to calculate total cost for one individual service that can be done by tracking and referring the usage of the individual service.

AI and machine learning based tools help to some extent but don't replace human actions. Software can provide additional insights that are missed by the staff, but people must collaborate when analyzing cloud cost strategies and make judgment calls based on resources and experience.

Cloud automation

Cloud automation means to automate the repetitive manual work. It enables IT team to speed up the infrastructure, monitor the environment and automatically adjust to workloads as per demand. The main idea is to improve operational efficiencies, speed up application deployment and minimize human error that can bring down applications.

Cloud automation challenges

The idea of automation is to save time and money. Perception that automation would put people out of a job is one of the big challenges. In most situations, automation helps to carry out a job and free up the team to do other work.

Cloud monitoring

Cloud monitoring is a process of observing, reviewing and managing the workflow. It is basically a process of evaluating health of cloud infrastructure. Monitoring makes it easier to identify patterns and discover potential threat and risks.

It includes website monitoring, virtual machine monitoring, database monitoring, virtual network monitoring, cloud storage monitoring.

Cloud monitoring challenges

The distributed topology makes it difficult for teams to keep up and need to adjust their monitoring strategies. Effective cloud monitoring is a complex task. Different types of applications will need to be monitored in different ways, thus tools they require will be different and require different set of skills to use them.

Performance management

To achieve desired result from architecture its performance needs to be managed. It is the practice of assessing various metrics and benchmark for cloud systems. Tips to improve cloud performance:

• Monitor performance. As mentioned, use monitoring tools and invest time to analyze all the data sources to get insight.
• Automate. Tasks which require manual input, add risk of causing errors as well as slow things down. Make use of automation to automate most of the maintenance and support operations.
• Caching. Caches improve the speed of accessing files. You can use multiple caches so users can access files from the location nearest to them.
• Microservices. An application is broken into small individual functional modules. These are more responsive than one single application. These microservices make large number of API calls to process transactions. The overhead of all these calls can cause measurable impact on the overall performance. Do not over do the microservices.
• Use Right Instances. Multiple instance types are designed to support different types of workloads. Selecting the right instance to satisfy the demand.
• Connect directly to cloud. This improves the network performance and security when the data moves between in-house data center and the cloud.

Another way to manage and improve application performance in the cloud is through load balancing. Load balancers are used to increase capacity and reliability of application. They do this by allocating resources among multiple computers, servers, and network.

Cloud management strategies

Cloud management strategy success depends not just on the proper use of tools and automation but also on having a competent IT team in place. IT and business teams must work together in order to understand cloud to achieve the business's goals.

IT teams must also test cloud application performance, monitor cloud computing metrics, make critical infrastructure decisions, address patch and security vulnerabilities, and update the business rules that drive cloud management. Companies must rethink their change management policies for the cloud, where consumption of resources can be more much more rapid and spread out versus an on-premises IT environment.

Companies that lack a skilled IT staff can seek help from third parties. They can get third-party management service within their budget that can monitor and notify about their cloud spending. Cloud brokerages often have a service catalog and some financial management tools.

At Flentas, we help Enterprises, SMEs and Startups to build, operate and monitor their public cloud environments. This helps reduce operational overhead, accelerate cloud adoption and help businesses focus on product innovation.

We automate common activities, such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services, and provide 24x7 support model to provision, run and support cloud infrastructure.

Flentas offers Cloud Computing Consulting Services which include Aws Cloud Services to industries like FinTech, Gaming, Manufacturing, Entertainment and many more, in Pune and Mumbai, and Dubai.