Cloud has become the infrastructure of choice for information technology in many companies. Where should your cloud effort go this year?
- Multi-cloud. If one cloud is good, is more than one cloud better? More companies are adopting multi-cloud solutions to take advantage of the best pricing and best technology options. With multi-cloud, you can craft solutions tailored to the need of each specific workload. If you’ve ended up with multi-cloud because different departments made different cloud selections, it’s time to rationalize your strategy.
- Containers. Because one of the main goals of using cloud is increasing agility, containers are growing in importance as a deployment technology. There have been security issues with containers in the cloud due to unsecured consoles, but container vendors are increasing security and management features to address these concerns.
- Private cloud. Private cloud has always been a choice for companies concerned about protecting sensitive data in public cloud, and improvements in cloud software offerings and hyperconverged systems now make it easier for companies to implement and manage their own internal clouds.
- Automation everywhere. Because the cloud is so distributed by nature, making sure patches and policies are implemented everywhere is difficult to do manually. Automation that handles routine operations and applies changes everywhere ensures systems are managed consistently. Automation is also a critical factor in achieving greater agility.
- Refactor applications. If you’ve had good experiences with the basics of cloud, consider redesigning applications to get even more benefits. For many existing applications, taking advantage of the cloud’s scalability is difficult due to designs that aren’t service-oriented.
- Data management. Cloud applications are only useful when they have the data they need. Implementing strategies to govern and share data across clouds is important to achieve both agility and security.
- Cloud management. Companies have been using cloud long enough that it’s time to take a step back and review what your cloud environment contains. Get costs under control by shutting down unneeded resources, consolidating low utilization resources, using reserved instances, and enforcing end-of-day shutdowns. There are now good tools available to help collect and analyze cloud usage data to spot the opportunities for cost reduction.
dcVAST provides a broad range of cloud services to help you with all your cloud needs. We offer managed services for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform and use CloudHealth to gain insight for optimization. Our data management expertise ensures your data will be available for use in whichever cloud it’s needed. Contact us to learn how dcVAST can help you address your cloud priorities in 2019.
