Mismanagement can send your cloud infrastructure plummeting to earth. Discover how to avoid serious setbacks and realize competitive advantage.
Cloud infrastructure is now the backbone of modern businesses, driving everything from daily operations to innovation. However, as organizations increasingly rely on it, many overlook critical management aspects. This often leads to inefficiencies, security risks, and ballooning costs.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. Businesses can conquer the cloud by understanding common cloud infrastructure management pitfalls and adopting best practices.
This article explores what’s wrong with the way many businesses manage their infrastructure. Read on to discover actionable insights for optimal cloud use.
Three Common Cloud Infrastructure Management Mistakes
1. Not Investing Enough in Governance
Many organizations aren’t investing enough in comprehensive cloud governance frameworks. This is a disaster waiting to happen. Half-baked frameworks limit control and oversight over vital operations—such as cost management, regulatory compliance, risk management, and data security and management—making it harder to support the organization’s strategy and goals.
2. Overprovisioning and Underutilization
Sometimes, organizations overestimate requirements and acquire more capacity than necessary, resulting in “cloud waste”. Other times, they have the right cloud capacity but aren’t fully using it to maximize value. Overprovisioning and underutilization are things to avoid, whether you’re just starting or are deep into your cloud journey.
3. Making Security An Afterthought
Robust security measures and practices are imperative once data and critical applications move to the cloud. It ensures that assets are protected from:
- Zero-day exploits
- Advanced persistent threats (APTs)
- Insider threats from disgruntled employees
- Malware, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and other modern cyberattacks
When businesses take a lax approach to security and don’t implement appropriate guardrails to fend off these internal and external security threats, even the most promising cloud modernization initiatives can become a nightmare.
Understanding The True Cost Of Poor Cloud Management
Now that we’ve covered the main pitfalls let’s look at how cloud infrastructure mismanagement impacts the bottom line.
Financial Implications
There’s a direct correlation between cloud infrastructure management and total spending. For example, when the existing governance framework doesn’t provide comprehensive visibility into cloud footprint and usage, IT sprawl could emerge and cause costs to grow uncontrollably. At the same time, it could hinder regulatory compliance and attract fines of up to $20 million.
Similarly, lax security could lead to a data breach, which could potentially cost $4.88 million. The costs of reputational damage can be higher.
Performance Degradation
Without proper management, ensuring consistent, reliable performance across diverse workloads in a cloud-based infrastructure is complex. Variability can stem from the shared nature of resources, network latency, resource contention, poor interoperability, and several other factors.
Regardless of the root cause, performance degradation can have far-reaching consequences. For example, workers may use shadow IT to bypass slow processes, improve productivity, or for convenience. While they may have no ill intention, these unmonitored points could open a back door for bad actors.
Operational Inefficiencies
Poor cloud infrastructure management creates inefficient processes and workflows that make it harder to run daily operations. Imagine the struggle of waiting to use resources that are either unavailable or misconfigured. Now imagine the snowball effect if such a scenario affects multiple employees and recurs—countless hours would be lost, many deadlines would be missed, and many customers would be frustrated.
The good news is that you can avoid these costs by adopting best practices.
Cloud Infrastructure Management Best Practices
Implementing Strong Governance Frameworks
Your governance model should be well-structured with clear policies that balance business drivers, requirements, security risks, and compliance standards. It should also automate enforcement with relevant tools.
Follow these steps to set up your cloud governance framework:
- Draft a comprehensive policy document that defines operational and financial controls, including how many cloud instances you’ll use and who can change the cloud environment.
- Choose the right automation tools to implement controls.
- Start monitoring controls immediately and regularly audit them to ensure everything stays in order.
Optimizing Resource Allocation
Performing cloud cost and data usage analysis is time-consuming and complex in modern environments, where various workload types and a large number of instances run concurrently. Leveraging real-time cloud monitoring instruments is usually the best approach to aligning resource allocation with workload requirements.
To reduce IT sprawl, decommission unused cloud resources, then merge and consolidate the remaining resources where possible. For instance, instead of disparate databases, use a multimodal one that handles different models and data types from a single, integrated backend. This can go a long way in optimizing resource use.
Enhancing Security Posture
Move beyond defense to stay ahead of modern threats. Consider orchestrating a holistic security information and event management (SIEM) solution that automates threat monitoring, detection, and response.
Implement robust mechanisms to keep data encrypted in transit and at rest. Set up multi-factor authentication and solid identity and access management control across the cloud infrastructure to keep bad actors out completely.
Remember, security isn’t a one-off project. It’s important to conduct regular compliance checks and audits to ensure that everything stays up-to-date and effective.
How Core BTS Can Help
Core BTS provides comprehensive cloud management solutions to help the world’s most impactful companies stay at the cutting edge. Our tailored solutions integrate governance, cost optimization, and security to maximize your investment’s value. CoreAIR, one of Core BTS’s newest Hybrid Infrastructure solutions, is designed to help businesses optimize their cloud environments efficiently.
If you’re looking to build an infrastructure that:
- Is resilient, secure, and always up and on
- Supports the scale and speed at which today’s business moves
- Minimizes IT sprawl
- Increases cost predictability and contains cloud spend
Then Core BTS is the right partner.
Explore a success story of how we helped a leading healthcare provider leverage cloud modernization to handle over 250,000 daily requests from customers across more than 35 states.
Next Steps
Proper cloud management is essential to running operations optimally and driving your bottom line and reputation. It’s within reach if you invest in governance, implement the right resource optimization tools, and put security at the center of your initiative.
So, don’t leave anything to chance. With Core BTS, you can ensure a secure, efficient, and cost-effective cloud environment. Get a tailored one-hour consultation to improve your cloud infrastructure management.
