Five-point strategy for efficient cloud operations

Need for efficient cloud operations

“Cloud first” is the way to go, and many organizations are quickly catching on to this.

And so they are taking a cloud-first strategy to migrate and modernize their IT landscape—to move away from Capex models, reduce technical debt, and gain overall business agility. Beyond these cloud advantages, such an approach allows easy integration with other cloud-native services and offers benefits like availability, scalability, flexibility, security, and cost efficiency. However, migration and modernization aren’t enough to guarantee all possible benefits of the cloud. Effective cloud operations are critical for organizations to realize the true value of the cloud. And efficacy is achieved when additional optimization is considered for cloud-based processes and operations covering aspects such as cloud configuration or consumption of cloud resources across infrastructure, platform, and software layers. 

From a cloud operations standpoint, it is important to consider key components such as compute, storage, network, and security during the initial “design and build” stage and define the “operations” stage to address the aspects of ongoing provisioning, deploying, operating, monitoring, and managing the cloud environment.

Let’s take a look at five things enterprises need to focus on for efficient cloud operations.

Five-point strategy 

A proven success mantra based on our work with customers worldwide

• Keep an open and agnostic cloud operations framework: It is important to choose a cloud operations framework that is suitable for your organization, particularly your operating structure, and processes. Carefully select the tools and processes to manage the business unit-wise cloud landscape; as well as to operate and manage the overall cloud environment across all business units. The basic framework of tools and processes should be flexible enough to plug in new technologies, volumes, multi-cloud environments, and hybrid environments with the right levels of monitoring, management, and operational rigor. 

• Harness the power of automation: Automated and Machine Learning (ML)-enabled operations must be an integral part of the cloud operations strategy. It brings accuracy, and efficiency, and reduces manual operation errors. There are several industry-leading solutions to choose from. For instance, TCS Cloud Exponence, based on Machine First™ delivery principles, drives efficient cloud operations services leveraging cloud-native automation solutions such as AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) and AWS CloudFormation (AWS CFT). It can be integrated with various cloud-native features such as AWS Single Sign-On (SSO), Amazon Cloudwatch, AWS Cloud Trail, AWS Systems Manager, API Gateway, and AWS Lambda. Compliance is another aspect of cloud operations that automation can help address.

• Define the right practices to ensure better availability: Cloud operations primarily deal with delivering the cloud environment and managing cloud-hosted application services. Ensuring the availability and performance of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are critical aspects of cloud operations. Hence, it is important to consider the right tools to back up and recover all types of data to guarantee business continuity. Data replication should be an integral part of an enterprise's cloud operations strategy. This will ensure secondary systems are ready to step up in case of any unforeseen disruptions to the primary systems and services. 

• Set the right thresholds and limits: To effectively manage the cloud environment, we need to adapt IT service management best practices and proactively monitor events and incidents with the right observability principles. This will give the right level of visibility into systems’ health, help set the right thresholds based on usage patterns, and manage cloud resources during peak and off-peak periods. Tracking of thresholds and limits is an important strategy, based on which cloud operations could be monitored, optimized, and scaled on demand.

• Keep a close watch on cloud costs: Cost efficiency is one of the competitive gains businesses expect from the cloud. However, overprovisioning and under-utilized resources lead to inefficiencies and put the business case off the limits. This can be addressed with the right cloud governance model to control costs and manage the budget for the cloud. Tools such as AWS Cost Manager, and AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), used with visualization options such as Amazon Quicksight, can help. It is also important to define architectural standards for what can be deployed on the cloud and how. Enforce cloud cost management standards by monitoring and analyzing in-depth insights into cloud spend in addition to the basic monitoring and measuring of cloud costs.

Exponential value

A strategy for continuous optimization and sustainable growth

When you have the right strategy for cloud operations in place, here’s what you stand to gain:

• Accelerated cloud journey: Automation and AI and ML-enabled platform and accelerators enable efficient, accurate, and cost-managed CloudOps.

• Improved service delivery: A clear cloud operations strategy defines proactive monitoring, catalog-based provisioning, analytical reports generation, quality assurance tests that need to be performed, and cost governance—all of which boost productivity and lead to cloud operations efficiency.

• Continuous optimization: Ongoing improvement of cloud operations practices and best practices for cloud operations tasks such as automated provisioning, request handling, monitoring, and scaling enable uninterrupted availability of the environments that run on cloud platforms.

Simplify cloud 

An efficient CloudOps strategy guarantees a smoother cloud adoption journey

With multi-cloud hybrid environments driving IT operation demands, enterprises are seeking seamless service delivery methods that address day-to-day activities to manage their cloud environments.  You can optimize the use of the cloud through effective deployment and management of cloud environments. It also helps improve the ability to experiment and innovate with new technologies and explore new services. 

The five-point strategy for efficient cloud operations will enable enterprises to adopt the right practices to effectively govern and run cloud-based environments and better realize the benefits of their cloud adoption journey.