Simple Steps for Smarter Cloud Management

Believe it or not, “the cloud” used to be a tech buzzword akin to how we currently band around the term “AI”. The only real difference between these two is that the former is now firmly entrenched in pretty much all facets of life, from the personal to the professional, while the latter still has a few hurdles to break free from its buzzword boundaries! But even with the mass-scale adoption and utilization of cloud technologies, some companies still struggle to wring the full benefits from it that they ought to be. This post will cover a few ways in which any business or organization can reap the best results from their cloud stack in order to boost efficiency, increase security, and make life easier and more productive for those at the sharp end of the stick who actually use it day in and day out.

Reinforcing Cloud Security And Governance

For most businesses, ensuring their security protocols are robust and immune from intrusion or accidental deletion is are vital step to take if they want to keep operations running fluidly, and that they comply with the varied and numerous regulations that surround data. Taking the initiative of learning what is cloud security is important for businesses is the first step to being able to fully embrace the technology while keeping peace of mind that anything you choose to store will remain safe and secure. But while this is easy to talk about in theory, what are the practical steps that must be taken to turn the words into actionable results?

Enable Strong Identity And Access Management (IAM)

To start, you can capture the lowest-hanging fruit by simply setting up permission-based access management. This is essentially a way to filter out those who might not need access to certain parts of your cloud and only allow those who do. This has various advantages, including:

• Reduces the risk of unauthorized access: The first and perhaps most obvious benefit is that you will stop anyone who doesn’t have the required permissions to access certain data from accessing it. This streamlines operations by reducing information overload and keeping things accountable for everyone.
• Enhances your compliance with data regulations: The world as it is today is completely saturated with regulations surrounding access to data. By setting up IAM, you make it more likely that you will comply with not only current regulations, but also those that might come about in the future.
• Improves accountability: Detailed logs and activity tracking help detect anomalies, suspicious actions, or policy violations. This helps with any audits you might create and allows you to better see who is accessing what data at what time. This means that if you do happen to see any anomalies, you will save time and resources when investigating.

Optimize Costs Without Sacrificing Performance

The beauty of opting for a cloud-based system over how things were done in days gone past (i.e., in-house storage) is that you have total control over how much you spend. In other words, you only pay for what you need when you need it. This is an amazing advantage, but far too many companies fail to correctly utilize the platforms they’ve subscribed to and end up leaking money on performance and actions they may not need.

Use Right-Sizing Principles

This is the process of adjusting your cloud resources so they match the actual usage and performance needs of your applications. It sounds straightforward, because it is in many regards, but not enough businesses will implement right-sizing principles. This is a more acute issue the longer you use a specific platform, as the temptation is to continue upgrading tiers to match a specific requirement, without checking if there is any way to lower other options. One option you have, depending on the platform you use, is to replace always-on servers with auto-scaling clusters.

Take Advantage of Reserved And Spot Instances

This is a two-tiered approach that covers methods to reduce the overall cost to you by letting you run workloads much cheaper than standard on-demand pricing.

1. Reserved instances: Essentially, setting up reserved instances allows you to reserve a compute instance in advance for an agreed-upon price for a length of time. This is ideal for situations that involve predictable workloads and access to databases, etc.
2. Spot instances: This is when a provider offers unused cloud computing capacity at huge discounts. The main downside is that you are at the whim of the provider, which can take them back at any time (usually when demand increases for them). But when used for tasks like machine learning or batch jobs, you can discover substantial savings.

Implement Automated Shutdown Policies

By turning off unused capacity, such as shutting down environments used for development and testing when not in use, you can reduce the total number of operation hours.

Your mileage may vary, but this gives you a good idea of what you can expect to save with pretty basic techniques.

Use Automation and Cloud-Native Tools

If there is one thing that technology has been supposed to help people and companies with, it’s from its ability to automate the sorts of tasks that need to get done, but are laborious and prone to error when performed by a human. When it comes to this option, you have plenty of tools at your disposal.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

Actions like backups and cleaning out logs are the kinds of things that have to be done for obvious reasons, but take time and resources away from humans who could otherwise be performing far more productive tasks.

Embrace Infrastructure As Code (IaC)

If you are the kind of company that takes all actions through the portal that is provided by your cloud providers, you are wasting time and effort. Instead, you should embrace IaC that allows you to describe your infrastructure in code, and the tool automatically builds or updates it.

The cloud is arguably one of the more important innovations to come out of the tech world for a very long time (and is used for the latest and greatest innovations like machine learning and AI). But if not used to its fullest capacity, you can lose out in terms of productivity and cost. By following these steps, you are more likely to boost efficiency and keep your costs manageable over time.