Blog: Cloud

5 Best Practices for Cloud Management

March 2, 2022 - by Synoptek

The rapid growth of the digital economy, the pace of technological progress, and constantly changing consumer preferences are all putting enormous pressure on businesses to be adaptable, scalable, and agile. As a result, adopting and managing the cloud has become critical to every organization’s success. With businesses at the risk of falling behind their competitors, effective cloud services give them the flexibility to scale and adapt their business model to changing market conditions and possibilities.

Cloud Best Practices

When users in an organization decide to employ infrastructure and solutions from various cloud vendors, challenges arise. As more organizations adopt the cloud, it is important to efficiently manage cloud services to fully reap its benefits. That said, here are 5 best practices organizations need to embrace for effective cloud management:

1. Develop an Efficient Migration Strategy

If your company is going to embark on a cloud migration journey, it’s critical to map out the process ahead of time. With tight budgets and stringent regulatory standards, there’s immense pressure to get a lot done – as quickly as possible. Hence, it is essential to prioritize. The first question to ask is which applications and workloads should be moved to the cloud and assess their operational costs as well as their impact on the organization’s overall goal. Applications or workloads that do not fit into one of the above categories should be given a lower migration priority.

Once the prioritization is done, you can migrate to the cloud using a variety of methods, including partial refactor, full refactor, lift and shift, or by incorporating software-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service. Finally, choose a cloud service provider by comparing their resources, costs, and efficiency based on region, budget, and team.

2. Centralize Cloud Governance

Cloud governance is a set of rules and procedures designed to improve data security, manage risks, and keep things functioning smoothly in the cloud. The most efficient way to manage cloud infrastructure scaling is to define policies, which can proactively alert on any irregularities, such as cost spikes, security vulnerabilities, and compliance issues, across various business units and departments that consume cloud resources.

Setting governance can provide a strategic direction, including tracking performance, making modifications, and allocating resources. This guarantees that the organization’s goals are met while remaining within risk tolerance limitations.

3. Increase Visibility

You cannot manage what you cannot see. Hence, having a single, comprehensive picture of functioning throughout the cloud environment is critical. Regardless of the underlying cloud infrastructure, visibility enables IT planners to determine the best resource allocations, perform a collective cost analysis of resources, and correlate them to specific business activities.

As a result of this transparency, it will be simpler for IT professionals to have a detailed view of business operations and this information can be leveraged for better investment.

4. Reduce Resource Costs and Maximize Utilization

Organizations must constantly optimize their infrastructure to eliminate waste and reduce operational costs in the cloud. Infrastructure optimization can be carried out in several ways such as identifying possibilities to have a service at a discounted price, determining under or overutilized resources, comparing service price and efficiency on multiple cloud platforms, picking the proper architecture, and so on.

Cloud infrastructure architecture has a significant role in resource optimization. These days, serverless options are available that allow businesses to scale resources up or down based on demand. An efficient cloud management practice can help reduce management overhead by discovering optimization opportunities and recommending actions and discounts for the best return on investment.

5. Integrate Cloud and Business

The ultimate goal of cloud management is to fully integrate cloud into your business, with the key objective of infusing cloud management operations into the day-to-day activities of users inside and outside of IT. Departments must integrate cloud and operational KPIs with the organization’s business KPIs to measure the impact of cloud consumption.

Networks are another important component of cloud integration, and they must be structured to allow businesses to seamlessly execute their applications in a hybrid computing environment.

Right Approach Can Lead to the Right Outcomes

Organizations can improve operational efficiency, reduce IT cost, increase speed and agility, and improve the effectiveness of their services by efficiently managing the cloud. However, if cloud management isn’t done correctly, the challenges may outweigh the benefits. In an economy that is witnessing digital transformation, it is crucial to approach cloud management correctly to compete and stay relevant. Follow these steps to promptly adapt to changing business needs, innovate efficiently and introduce new products and services to market. With the right approach to cloud management, you can significantly minimize costs, maximize security, as well as enhance visibility and control.

Whether your business is thinking of making the leap to the cloud or your journey has already begun, Synoptek’s Cloud Strategy Consulting Services can help

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