In the emerging cloudy world, new management challenges have emerged. The same is true for cloud computing solutions, including cloud computing service providers (CSP), cloud computing management platforms (CMP) and cloud access security agents (CASB).
In terms of cloud services, many organizations are considering deploying a variety of cloud products to meet various business needs. Whether it is software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), this cloudy strategy is correct, which brings some challenges and opportunities for the digital transformation of enterprises.
Benefits of cloudy strategy
The report Enterprise Cloud released by IDG Company in August 20 18 shows that many enterprises are continuing to increase investment and improve their cloud computing environment so that they can use the required technologies to achieve their business goals. Based on an online survey of 550 IT decision makers in various industries, the research shows that nearly one third (30%) of organizations have a combination of hybrid and cloud environments.
The benefits of deploying cloud strategy for enterprises include increased cloud computing options (59%), easier and faster disaster recovery (40%) and increased flexibility (38%) by allowing workloads to expand across multiple cloud platforms.
Nearly 40% of the respondents said that their IT departments felt the pressure to migrate 65,438+000% of their business to the cloud platform, and the IT management of 44% enterprises (with more than 65,438+0000 employees) felt the pressure from the executive management or a single business department to migrate 65,438+000% to the cloud platform. So cloudy will probably continue to play a role.
Best practice of cloudy strategy
Although some functions have been transferred to service providers, the rise of cloud computing services will not simplify the tasks of IT departments. In fact, having multiple cloud computing services may increase complexity, and many organizations may not have the required in-house expertise.
Timothy Morrow, manager of context-aware technology in CERT department of the School of Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said that the technology and services of any single cloud computing service provider (CSP) are changing rapidly, which makes it difficult for IT personnel of an organization to keep up with the times.
Moreau said that when an organization chooses to implement a cloudy environment, IT will greatly expand what IT employees need to know and receive training. For example, PaaS and SaaS products are tailored for each cloud computing service provider (CSP), which requires a deeper understanding of their usage. This in turn means that when using the services of multiple cloud computing service providers (CSP), its complexity will increase significantly.
The following are some recommended best practices for successfully using the cloudy strategy.
Determine how to better connect to cloud computing service providers (CSP) and port data.
How an organization intends to use the services of a cloud computing service provider (CSP) has a significant impact on the type of connection required to connect the organization's assets and services with CSP.
Moreau said that organizations need to conduct due diligence in many areas to help understand the connection requirements. These include architecture and design to address quality attributes that are critical to the organizational vision. The use of automation technology helps to reduce the burden of IT personnel, security policy governance and risk management. You need to do this for all cloud computing service providers (CSP) you are considering using. Remember that each cloud computing service provider (CSP) provides different operational and security functions.
As for data portability, being able to use data across different cloud computing service providers (CSP) is a major challenge. This is especially true when using providers' platforms as services and SaaS services, because their customization is vendor-specific, Moreau said.
IT personnel must understand the input and output data format requirements of the service under consideration, and provide the interface needed to use the data between the cloud computing service provider (CSP) and the local assets of the organization.
Morrow said that using containers can provide a certain degree of portability for organizations, and provide a deployment and runtime environment that organizations can use to run the same application in PaaS of multiple cloud computing service providers (CSP). The software used to run and manage containers will continue to focus on providing a consistent implementation among cloud computing service providers (CSP) to help simplify the tasks of IT personnel.
Deployment resource label
Cloud computing service providers provide the ability to deploy, burst and automatically expand resources on demand. Brian Reynolds, head of Grant Thornton, an auditing, taxation and consulting agency, said that in a cloudy environment, resource management and control, accounting and consumption cost allocation may be more difficult.
Reynolds said that in order to simplify these necessary management responsibilities, organizations can use resource tags composed of key-value pairs, assign metadata to resources, and organize them logically by categories.
Industry-leading cloud computing service providers support resource tagging. It improves the ability of organizations to realize resource-level permissions based on tags; Quickly start and reduce related resources of different resource groups; And continuously monitor and track the expenses according to the established subscription budget.
Adopt cloud computing management platform (CMP)
The cost of managing cloudy environment includes the personnel cost of maintaining cloudy ability and professional knowledge, as well as management control, integration, performance design, and isolation of problems and defects.
Reynolds said that native tools can be used to manage resources provided by different cloud computing service providers. But in order to reduce these costs and improve manageability, many organizations are adopting cloud computing management platform (CMP).
These software platforms include local tools and third-party products provided by public cloud providers, aiming to provide consistent functions across multiple cloud computing providers.
They support functions such as configuration and coordination, creating, modifying and deleting resources as needed, automation, security and compliance (including managing access to role-based cloud computing services), monitoring and logging, inventory and classification, cost management and optimization, and migration, backup and disaster recovery.
Use the choreography system
Reynolds said that as SaaS products deployed through different cloud computing service providers (CSP) increasingly provide financial, employee, customer and other assets and operation record systems, organizations find it very important to bind solutions running in different clouds to workflow automation in participating systems. These are used to improve the data collection experience.
Similarly, with the proliferation of cloud architecture, it is increasingly necessary for organizations to implement business process systems to achieve best-in-class PaaS and SaaS workflows delivered across multiple cloud computing service providers (CSP).
Reynolds said that these business process systems will need to use the underlying applications based on the products of first-class cloud computing service providers (CSP) to support the organization. They may be the key to value creation, he said, because insight and services can only be provided by integrating the recording system running in the cloud architecture.
Take necessary safety and compliance precautions.
When enterprises use various cloud services, the supply of IT resources and infrastructure projects will be removed from the controlled environment of the data center, rather than being established outside the governance practice.
This may lead to some network security problems, including unauthorized use of multiple different cloud computing products. The risk of data leakage or network security protocols being ignored or bypassed will increase.
Reynolds said that in order to help meet this challenge, enterprises can deploy tools such as Cloud Access Security Agent (CASB) to understand the access and usage of cloud services. They can evaluate the security status of different cloud computing providers and control the use and exposure of sensitive data.
Compliance is another key issue. Bill Connor, enterprise infrastructure architect of Forest County Potawatomi, a commercial development organization, said that it is very important to ensure that every cloud service and workflow complies with regulations and meets the requirements after migration.
IT needs to identify the people in the organization who are responsible for monitoring compliance and involve them in the deployment process of the cloud plan as early as possible. Connor said that maintaining compliance is an ongoing process, so IT departments should select team members to continuously assess and manage risks.
Use suppliers' products to better manage services.
Connor said that one of the main challenges organizations face when choosing cloud services for cloudy environments is to keep pace with all emerging options.
Connor pointed out that cloud computing services have completely changed the way enterprises do business, enabling organizations to do more things than before, but it is a challenge to establish an application roadmap that is most suitable for migration and services. More importantly, migrating services from internal to the cloud is a challenge, especially when maintaining legacy applications.
Connor said that organizations should seek to implement solutions to help them solve the challenges of selection, migration and cloud computing service costs. For example, vendors such as Nutanix provide tools such as analysis and lifecycle management to help simplify and better manage the IT environment and optimize costs.
Avoid runtime dependence and solve cognitive complexity.
Max Edmands, classification engineering manager of Good Eggs, an online grocery and catering service provider, said that a common challenge in using multiple cloud computing services is cascading failures.
If the SaaS system fails at runtime, the original system must now handle the failure in some way. If things are not established correctly, the system may also fail, leading to cascading failures of other systems. This may result in customers not being able to shop or orders being interrupted.
Enterprises can alleviate this situation by avoiding runtime dependencies. A completely independent system will not cause harm to cascading failures. Edmands says this can cache data and spread updates through some kind of event bus.
Another challenge is the complexity of cognition. Whenever an enterprise adopts the services of a third-party provider to meet its business needs, it is necessary to understand how the new provider works.
For example, Edmands said that it recently joined a new master data management system, Riversand, to provide authoritative data sources for the products it sells. It must carefully configure the system to ensure that it can meet its specific business needs. To configure the system, enterprises must fully understand it.
Use the application programming interface (API)
When enterprises try to integrate multiple cloud computing products into a cohesive infrastructure, integration is crucial, and API plays an important role.
Glenn Pinnel, CIO of Benjamin Moore, a paint manufacturer, said that organizations need to establish the correct API so that systems can work together to create a seamless user experience without delay or service delay.
For example, the company is launching an e-commerce account plan, which will enable customers to order paints more effectively. In order to make everything run normally, it has an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform running at the back end, an e-commerce platform running at the front end, several other applications based on cloud computing on the main website, and other computing applications for pricing and taxation.
Pinnel said that all infrastructure and applications are combined through API, so that there is no lag or delayed service for the product. Trying to manage this on a single cloud platform will be more difficult and may affect the user experience, he said.