Implementing cloud solutions is no longer just desirable for businesses, it’s essential. The COVID-19 pandemic and rapid innovation of technology mean that up to 94% of enterprises use one cloud service or more. In the next year and beyond, what cloud infrastructure challenges should you be aware of when looking to optimize your cloud environment?
What Forms Your Cloud Infrastructure?
Cloud infrastructure is the vital hardware and software that underpins your cloud computing processes. In an enterprise, it’s the servers, networking equipment, virtualization software, and data storage that supports the delivery of your cloud solutions.
While cloud infrastructure differs depending on your business, such as public, private, or hybrid architectures, the best practice for cloud infrastructure management remains the same. Organizations are looking for more effective ways to control costs, remain secure, and optimize assets.
As enterprise cloud environments continue to grow, businesses must implement measures to optimize their cloud. Here are our three top concerns to look out for.
The 3 Key Cloud Infrastructure Concerns of 2021
1. The Costs of the Cloud
It’s estimated that one-third of cloud spending is wasted. This can be due to several challenges, from lack of visibility of your entire IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS environments to inefficient pricing models. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated uptake of the cloud, with most businesses using more cloud services than planned.
The shift to remote working has increased demand for cloud solutions, tools, and services that enable end-users to work away from the office. And now, over half of business leaders are more confident putting workloads and data in the cloud. But many lack effective measures to control costs.
Organizations are looking to the future. Your cloud environment will keep growing as confidence and reliance on cloud solutions does too. In 2021, enterprises will need to implement cloud cost optimization processes to better control the costs of the cloud. The biggest challenge will be finding the right cloud expertise to do so.
Your enterprise needs complete visibility of your cloud infrastructure environment. With cloud cost optimization, a team of experts will conduct an extensive audit your cloud. This gives you total visibility of your cloud infrastructure assets and its associated costs, all within one centralized portal. Then, if you choose to, cloud cost optimization experts can set up continuous reporting on your cloud, helping to control costs over time. This immediately identifies ways to minimize costs for the future, and the right provider can implement up to 550 best-practice audit checks against your environment.
2. Multi-cloud Challenges
There’s no doubt that the past year has impacted cloud complexity. 93% of enterprise organizations now have a multi-cloud environment and multi-cloud strategy, for example. And the next year will see businesses looking for better ways to manage their complex cloud environment.
Many cloud application workloads can’t move between multi-cloud environments easily. Cloud service providers (CSPs) can’t share application resources if one of them doesn’t have the capabilities. This creates inflexibility and risks of vendor lock-in. And while vendor lock-in is not always a bad thing, demand for different application services across multiple architectures continues to grow.
This demand comes with challenges. Maintaining security and compliance across multiple CSPs will need centralized visibility of the entire cloud environment. And effectively managing resources requires time and cloud skills that many internal teams lack. Ideally, you need a method of identifying the CSP resources that fit your business needs at the best rate.
Cloud management services can help you to achieve this. Expert teams can implement rightsizing measures across your environment that help you better allocate cloud resources.
Then, they’ll work directly with industry-leading vendors on your behalf to implement reserved instance purchasing recommendations. This identifies methods of migrating to more affordable and effective pricing models. By working with a cloud management service provider, you can build a cloud infrastructure overcomes the limitations of the common multi-cloud environment.
3. Compliance and Security
Using multiple CSPs for cloud data or workloads comes with inherent risks. And the most obvious risks are compliance and security related. If you lack the internal knowledge to stay on track with industry regulations or security risks, it’s easy for critical errors to go unnoticed.
In 2021, businesses that have accelerated their adoption of cloud solutions will need to strengthen security and compliance. The cloud is here to stay, so your cloud infrastructure must be future-proof.
Many organizations mistakenly believe that all security and compliance concerns fall within the responsibility of the CSP. However, this is not the case, and the level of responsibility largely depends on what you’ve opted for with your cloud provider. This makes achieving great cloud security complex without the right expertise.
Cloud management service providers are well-equipped to manage the unique challenges of compliance and security in 2021.
By auditing your entire cloud infrastructure environment, they'll not only take steps to optimize processes and control costs. They'll also help you regain visibility over every asset within your cloud estate.
This makes identifying compliance and security issues straightforward, and some cloud management service providers can continuously compare your cloud against up to 35 industry standards. They can also implement proactive verification, risk identification, and resolution services to provide 24/7 support for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. All from a single cloud management services provider.
Discover a Better Way to Manage Your Cloud Infrastructure Concerns
Managing your cloud environment will always be an uphill battle without the right resources and skills to do so. The growing complexity of the cloud only exacerbates its cost, architecture, compliance, and security concerns.
In 2021, your organization needs greater visibility of your cloud environment. Discover how Cass can audit yours in only 90 days.
