Today, infrastructure management is no longer a walk in the server park. In this fast-paced digital world, businesses are racing to harness the full potential of the cloud while dodging the thunderstorms of complexity and uncertainty.
As organizations increasingly rely on cloud services to drive their operations, it is crucial to adopt best practices that optimize efficiency, enhance security, and maximize the benefits of the cloud.
As per VentureBeat – The staggering global spending of $41.8 billion on cloud services infrastructure in Q1 2021, representing a 35% YoY growth and a 5% QoQ increase, underscores the growing importance of effective cloud infrastructure management.
Cloud infrastructure management goes beyond technical considerations; it involves strategic decision-making, resource allocation, application performance monitoring, and data protection.
With the right approach, you can navigate the complexities of cloud infrastructure management and unleash its full potential for your business’s success. Let’s look at proven best practices to unlock the full potential of the cloud while minimizing risks and ensuring seamless operations.
9 Best Practices for Cloud Infrastructure Management
As organizations increasingly adopt cloud services from multiple vendors, they encounter challenges in efficiently managing their cloud infrastructure. To fully leverage the benefits of the cloud, it is crucial for organizations to embrace the following key best practices for effective cloud infrastructure management.
1. Embrace a Multi-cloud Strategy
Instead of relying on a single cloud provider, adopt a multi-cloud strategy that allows you to leverage the strengths of different cloud vendors. This provides flexibility, avoids vendor lock-in, and enables access to specialized services from various providers.
2. Gain a Holistic View of Your Cloud Assets
In order to effectively manage your cloud resources, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of what critical assets are present in the cloud. This entails gaining a holistic view of your organization’s cloud infrastructure, including an assessment of each resource’s current state and growth potential.
By having a clear picture of your cloud assets, you can develop a strategy that aligns with your business goals and technical requirements, particularly when dealing with multiple cloud providers. This enables you to manage your cloud resources as a unified entity rather than disparate silos.
3. Establish Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans
Develop robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans tailored to your cloud environment. Regularly test these plans to ensure data backups, failover mechanisms, and recovery processes are effective and up to date.
4. Identify and Track All Cloud Assets Under Management
To ensure efficient cloud infrastructure management, it is essential to identify and track all the cloud assets under your organization’s management. Utilizing cloud infrastructure management tools can assist in this process by providing visibility into the assets you have deployed, their associated costs, and how to manage them effectively.
This empowers you to make informed decisions about resource allocation, time utilization, and budgetary control, allowing you to maintain a level of control over your cloud environment.
5. Keep Your Cloud Resources Inventory Up-To-Date
Maintaining an up-to-date inventory of your cloud resources is vital for effective cloud infrastructure management. By having a clear understanding of the resources, you possess, those you lack, and those you require, you can optimize your cost management efforts.
For example, if you encounter an issue with a particular instance of SQL Server in the cloud, an accurate inventory will enable you to identify and address the problem promptly.
6. Develop a Coherent Migration Strategy
Before migrating to the cloud, it’s important to prioritize workloads, considering factors such as operational costs and their impact on the organization’s overall goals. You can select from different migration methods, such as:
- Partial refactor
- Lift and shift
- Full refactor
- Adopting software-as-a-service
7. Embrace a Centralized Cloud Governance Framework
Establish a comprehensive cloud governance framework that defines policies, procedures, and responsibilities for managing cloud resources. It involves defining rules to improve data security efficiently manage risks and ensure the smooth functioning of the cloud infrastructure.
By setting governance policies, organizations can proactively monitor irregularities, like security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, etc.
8. Reduce Resource Costs and Maximize Utilization
Companies should continuously optimize their cloud infrastructure services in order to bring down their operational costs. This can be achieved by:
- Identifying opportunities for service discounts
- Comparing service prices and efficiency across various cloud platforms
- Choosing the appropriate architecture
Cloud infrastructure management practices can help discover opportunities and recommend actions for the best return on investment.
9. Increase Visibility in Your IT Organization
Having a comprehensive view of the entire cloud environment is essential for effective management. Visibility enables IT planners to allocate resources, analyze costs, and correlate them with specific business activities. It also helps IT professionals gain insights into business operations, facilitating better decision-making.
In conclusion
Effective cloud infrastructure management is crucial for maximizing the benefits of cloud services. Embracing best practices enables organizations to efficiently manage resources, enhance performance, reduce costs, ensure compliance, and drive continuous improvement.
By adopting the right strategies, companies can navigate complexities, unlock scalability, flexibility, and innovation, and achieve business growth in the digital landscape. DevOps is a practice that incorporates these best practices throughout the software development process.
IAMOPS offers start-ups the expertise they need to reap the benefits of these best practices. An expert DevOps team can identify and solve issues in your infrastructure at an early stage, which helps you focus on your product! Whether the product has an AWS infrastructure or Azure infrastructure, your cloud environment’s performance, security, and sustainability are all just a click away!
