Enterprise Cloud Adoption and Management: Key Factors

Governance and policy

This is one of the key capabilities which most organizations catch up on at a later stage in their cloud adoption. At the core, this demands clearly defining what users can do and establishing limits. A lack of cloud governance can lead to security holes, cloud sprawl, integration problems or shadow IT.

Monitoring and metering

Monitoring consumption of the cloud resources is an important lens to view cloud expenditure.

Cost transparency and optimization

This involves enabling tracking, budgeting and optimization of the cloud expenses. This is closely tied to orchestration and automation. Ensure all cloud resources are accounted for, all stakeholders and departments have visibility, cost is fully allocated and cloud governance is in place.

Capacity and resource optimization

The efficient operational use of the infrastructure footprint is an important factor. Capacity management is the practice of planning, managing, and optimizing IT infrastructure resource utilization so performance is high and infrastructure cost is low. It’s a balancing act of cost vs. performance that requires insight into the current and future usage.

Cloud migration and disaster recovery

Disaster doesn’t come with an appointment. Cloud readiness determination, discovery, lifting and shifting of workloads between and/or among on-premises and off-premises environments. It also requires workloads to be permanently migrated from one environment to another, and workloads re-positioned.

Security and identity management

There are various security-related functionalities needed in a cloud computing environment (for example, risk management, segregation of duties, single sign-on and key management), particularly those involving public cloud services. Restrict access with Active Directory, Security Assertion Markup Language or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol systems. Additionally, scanning and re-mediating deployed infrastructure for security vulnerabilities is needed where the remediation is performed by Provisioning, Orchestration and Automation.

Continuous delivery

It focuses on automating the software delivery process so that teams can easily and confidently deploy their code to production at any time. By ensuring that the code base is always in a deployable state, releasing software becomes an unremarkable event without a complicated ritual. Teams can be confident that they can release whenever they need to without complex coordination or late-stage testing. As with continuous integration, continuous delivery is a practice that requires a mixture of technical and organizational improvements to be effective.

Summary

Centizen’s cloud consulting and contract staffing services help our clients accelerate their journey to the cloud. For those already there, we can help you transform your enterprise cloud adoption with cloud infrastructure and reduce operational costs. We also help our customers with the selection and implementation of open-source applications to run in your cloud. Centizen’s cloud services put enterprises on the right track to fast and successful cloud optimization.