With the global cloud computing market expected to be worth $1.5 trillion by 2030, you’ve most likely concluded that the cloud is the only way forward. You’ve done all your homework. You’ve even migrated critical data and workloads to the cloud. But then you stumble upon not one, not two, but many roadblocks along the cloud journey. From the inability to enable seamless cloud advancement to poor cloud ROI.
You begin to wonder why your cloud strategy went wrong but do not always end up with a convincing answer. Likely, it’s not because of your inability to leverage the benefits of cloud technology. It is because you lack the capability and skill sets to align your cloud infrastructure with your business needs – something only Managed Cloud Services can fulfill!
Why Cloud Advancement isn’t Straightforward
Moving to the cloud, although a Herculean task, is just the tip of the iceberg. The real struggle begins once you’ve successfully accomplished the mammoth task of cloud migration. Efficiently maintaining workloads and ensuring your cloud infrastructure is aligned with evolving business and market needs is a different ball game altogether.
At the same time, achieving and maintaining secure and dynamic cloud capabilities so you can operate your business without a hitch and grow with confidence is not possible. Unless you have the right tools and competencies in place to help you efficiently monitor and manage your cloud resources.
Top 10 Cloud Management Challenges
What makes cloud management so difficult? Here are some challenges that are rampant with in-house cloud management:
1. Keeping Up with Innovation
Periodically updating your cloud strategy to keep pace with the latest innovations, developments, and updates in cloud technologies is essential for modern businesses. The rapid evolution of cloud computing demands a proactive approach to stay competitive and secure.
In today’s fast-paced digital environment, maintaining a static cloud strategy can lead to missed opportunities and potential vulnerabilities. By regularly assessing and adjusting your approach, you can ensure that your cloud infrastructure aligns with your current business objectives and leverages the most efficient and cost-effective solutions available.
2. Monitoring IT Operations
Transforming IT operations in a way that supports the dynamic nature of the cloud, although critical, is not easy to achieve. Businesses must revamp their IT operations by adopting cloud-native technologies, optimizing infrastructure, and embracing a DevOps culture that encourages collaboration and rapid innovation. Unless these changes are made, IT teams cannot efficiently manage the constantly evolving cloud landscape.
3. Dealing with the Lack of Cloud Resources
Understanding what cloud resources are needed and how to provision them for seamless scalability within a cloud-based infrastructure is a Herculean task. Lack of the right resources can restrict organizations from harnessing the full potential of the cloud. It also limits their ability to adapt swiftly to fluctuating demands while optimizing costs.
4. Ensuring Interoperability
Maintaining interoperability between different cloud services and between on-premises systems and the cloud is an imperative undertaking in the modern IT landscape. But this critical task demands a multifaceted approach to guarantee that data and applications can seamlessly traverse between different environments. Unfortunately, overburdened in-house IT teams fail to drive such high levels of interoperability.
5. Maintaining Security and Compliance
Constantly thwarting emerging risks and threats while overseeing cloud security and compliance is essential for cloud management. This requires organizations to use advanced technology, always be watchful, and stick to the rules set by regulators. They must also take a proactive approach to keep their cloud environments safe and abide by compliance standards.
6. Managing Cloud Tools
Effectively managing the different cloud tools being used by teams for varying purposes from multiple locations can be quite challenging. To ensure that they deliver the desired results, it is necessary to align them with the organization’s objectives and integrate them seamlessly for optimal efficiency. Organizations must also provide comprehensive training to the workforce, and continuously monitor and optimize their use.
7. Implementing the Right Policies
Implementing and enforcing the right policies to meet regulatory conditions and audit requirements is a critical undertaking in cloud management. It involves creating rules for how data is handled, making sure everything is secure, and checking that everything is in line with regulations. By following these rules, businesses can avoid legal problems, protect their data, and maintain a trustworthy cloud environment. This is essential for successful cloud management in a highly regulated environment.
8. Establishing Cloud Governance
Governing the usage of cloud and associated resources is vital to avoid sprawl or underuse, both of which can impact an organization’s efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Cloud sprawl can lead to congestion and unnecessary expenses, while underuse means investments go to waste. Organizations must implement smart governance to allocate resources according to real needs to ensure they don’t unnecessarily burden their cloud environment or waste investments.
9. Monitoring Cloud Costs
Efficiently monitoring cloud usage and curbing cloud costs via cloud cost optimization techniques is also extremely crucial. Cloud monitoring tools track resource consumption in real time, identifying unused resources and unexpected spikes in usage. Practices like right sizing and leveraging spot instances or reserved capacity can save costs and align cloud spending with business objectives, promoting financial efficiency in cloud operations.
10. Conducting Ongoing Assessments
Cloud adoption also requires organizations to regularly conduct assessments, audits, and monitoring to gauge the performance and security of cloud systems. By staying vigilant in recognizing both opportunities for improvement and potential risks, they can ensure that their investment in cloud technologies remains aligned with their strategic objectives.
How Managed Cloud Services Can Help Your Cloud Strategy
The cloud has revolutionized the way businesses operate. It eliminates the need for upfront capital investment in bulky on-premises systems. It also allows for highly available, scalable, and flexible business operations that will enable organizations to accomplish their goals easily. Although the cloud makes it easy to access on-demand resources as and when needed, it requires the backing of qualified professionals to mitigate risk, improve responsiveness, and enable continuous upkeep and maintenance.
If you find your teams struggling to keep up with the constant deluge of cloud updates and new functionality, you need to opt for ways to manage change and innovation more effectively. Since any inexperience with cloud technology can lead to misconfigurations, along with potentially costly errors, embracing Managed Cloud Services can open doors to efficient and continuous cloud management. Through modern design and management practices, these services enable appropriate and continuous scaling as needs are presented.
Complementing popular cloud services like Amazon and Azure, a Cloud Managed Services provider, can help leverage the latest innovations and capabilities. A partner can also add an extra layer of risk management, data protection, and long-term strategic planning. Investing in Managed Cloud Services means you can:
- Get the best ROI from your cloud investments while constantly optimizing costs via rightsizing or reserved instances.
- Ensure alignment between your cloud infrastructure and your people, processes, and technologies.
- Save in-house resource time while allowing them to focus more on operational outcomes.
- Effectively maintain a multi-cloud environment across an array of public, private, and hybrid clouds.
- Address short and long-term functionality, security, and privacy concerns.
Enjoy a trouble-free cloud experience along with an elevated level of cloud monitoring and management – 24/7. - Ensure your cloud infrastructure is always up-to-date and aligned with business strategies.
- Drive greater agility by leveraging the latest cloud innovations and responding faster, better, and smarter to evolving trends.
Keep Pace with Today’s Disruptions
No matter what industry you belong to, the whirlwind pace of technology innovations means you are forced to compete with new organizations and on a new playing field – every single day. As more and more companies move to the cloud, a modern approach to the continuous management of cloud resources is the need of the hour.
If you want to exploit cloud technologies to the fullest, strengthen your cloud strategy, and successfully deliver a cloud-first transformation mindset, you need to change the way you run and manage your cloud infrastructure. Opting for Managed Cloud Services is a great way to have a game plan in place that’s powered by a cloud-centric approach and a cloud-first culture.
Managed Cloud Services can not only bring your business up to speed with the latest in cloud, but they can also help you maintain that momentum while keeping up with today’s disruptions with agility and resilience.
Contact a Managed Cloud Provider today to derive the maximum benefits from your cloud migration efforts!
