With cloud computing growth increasing, enterprises’ cloud consumption is a major contributing factor. From digital currency adoption to prioritising the use of machine learning, there are many existing and emerging technologies that promise both improved operations and reduced costs. Those promised benefits are not always straight-forward to realize.
Let’s look at some of the key challenges and solutions.
Cost-Effectiveness: Visibility and Allocation
The biggest headline opportunity in moving to the public cloud is significantly reducing costs. Promised as being quick, benefiting from economies of scale, and removing the worries of aspects like redundancy and backups, it is easy to jump into the public cloud and spend even more money. Being easy to quickly provision resources, try new technologies, and scale-up, it is a buffet of possibilities that can get out of control if not monitored.
Visibility of costs across a cloud estate is the first major hurdle. For enterprises, knowing the total cost is not enough: they need to understand those costs according to a meaningful allocation breakdown. This could be a breakdown of costs according to projects or programs, cost centers, services, or business units—anything that helps provide visibility and, most importantly, ownership to costs so that they can be managed. Cloud management tools should handle this allocation and visibility of costs automatically, saving human effort from manually slicing-and-dicing within spreadsheets and providing near-real-time visibility.
Resource Optimisation: Automated Recommendations
The use of public cloud technology has a long maturity journey and no matter where an enterprise business is on that, the need to optimise resources without a lot of human effort is critical to keep costs down. Whether a business is relatively new to the public cloud and utilizing just virtual machines on the public cloud or is further along in maturity and using PaaS or serverless technologies via DevOps and/or CI/CD, there are many opportunities to let technology both automatically scale up/down and adjust configurations to be the most cost-effective.
Cloud management tools should support this initiative through continual assessment of deployed resources, providing recommended changes that can either be acted on manually, realized automatically through approved changes or in subsequent deployments that are adjusted for the workload. Enterprises should look for a cloud management tool that supports both the current and future resource types that they consume in the public cloud.
Compliance: Automated Auditing and Remediation
The public cloud typically uses the latest-and-greatest technologies available. This provides an inherent benefit of operating systems, applications, and software that has the latest security considerations and best practices already in place. There are still many factors that a business must still consider and be prepared to address to ensure security compliance. With the ease of deploying resources, either manually or through automated deployments, the need for continual security compliance auditing is a must, especially for enterprises that often have their own policies that need to be enforced and checked.
Enterprises are best served in managing public cloud security considerations through fully automated auditing tools as the volume of cloud resources is not practical for humans to manually conduct audit checks.
Cloud management tools like Kumoco Cloud Manager provide a continual assessment of security considerations at the account level and down to the resources themselves.
Even better, the ability to automatically remediate, or correct, any audit failures is important, as it means security issues are resolved faster, especially when there are already change management processes to consider.
Want to know how cloud management solutions like Kumoco Cloud Manager can support your enterprise? Book a demo.
