Organizations need to manage their cloud environments efficiently. Inefficient management can negate the financial and operational benefits of companies leveraging cloud computing. Decision-makers may question the choice to utilize the cloud due to the effects of poor management. The costs may not justify the rewards if the environment is mismanaged.
More effective cloud management requires understanding the common pitfalls and challenges in optimizing the environment and maximizing financial investments. Companies can resolve these issues by addressing the unexpected costs, inefficiencies, and security vulnerabilities resulting from inferior cloud environment management.
Typical Cloud Management Pitfalls and Solutions
We will look at some typical cloud management pitfalls your organization should strive to avoid. Organizations should strongly consider implementing the suggested solutions to these issues before they become serious problems.
Inattention to cloud service limits
Cloud service providers (CSPs) may limit the resources an account can consume. It may be impossible to perform activities like adding users to an SaaS application or accessing additional storage to address demand spikes once the thresholds are reached. Organizations may unexpectedly run into these limits, hindering them from addressing business requirements. Operations can be negatively affected, and a company may lose opportunities to attract new customers.
Companies must understand the specific resource limits and quotas they face when entering agreements with CSPs. A company should monitor usage and set up alerts so they are not caught off guard as they approach limits for a cloud service.
Comprehensive discovery and assessment before migrating workloads to the cloud provide an organization with valuable information that enables it to tailor agreements to address its unique needs.
Insufficient visibility
Effective cloud management requires visibility into the complete environment. Organizations must know where their valuable and sensitive data is stored so they can ensure its protection. Lack of visibility exposes a company to security vulnerabilities and puts their information at risk. Thorough visibility can provide a company with information regarding degraded performance or cost overruns.
Multi-cloud environments add additional challenges to achieving visibility into a company’s resources. Manually tracking a complex cloud environment is virtually impossible. A tool like VAST View provides customers with visibility into all their cloud and on-premises resources. Information available from the platform can be instrumental in streamlining and optimizing cloud management.
Data sprawl
Data sprawl is a problem closely associated with insufficient visibility into the cloud environment. Companies can accumulate extensive cloud storage resources, which can be challenging to manage efficiently. They may be spending unnecessary funds to store redundant or unorganized data.
Companies can solve this problem by effectively monitoring all their data resources. Based on lifecycle management policies, organizations can classify data and assign it to cost-effective storage solutions. Older data can often be archived using less expensive storage options than information required for daily operations. Major CSPs offer multiple storage options that meet these needs.
Over or under-provisioning resources
Companies can make mistakes when estimating the amount of resources they require. Organizations with seasonal or fluctuating requirements are especially prone to this issue. They may need varying levels of resources like storage, compute capacity, and network bandwidth to address specific business objectives.
Over-provisioning typically results in a company paying for idle resources that are not needed. Conversely, under-provisioning can leave an organization without the resources to handle internal or external customer demands.
The solution to this problem is to enter into agreements with cloud providers that allow auto-scaling to address varying business requirements. Dynamic provisioning can scale resources up or down based on an organization’s current needs. Companies should monitor cloud resources regularly to ensure their optimal usage.
Vendor lock-in
Vendor lock-in occurs when a company’s reliance on a specific CSP makes switching to an alternate provider difficult or impossible. An organization locked in with a vendor may be unable to take advantage of new services that better address its business objectives. The inability to move can result in lost revenue and degraded performance.
Companies should design their cloud architecture to support portability. Achieving portability may involve leveraging containers such as Kubernetes that can easily be migrated to a new cloud provider. Organizations should insist on entering into service level agreements (SLAs) that allow them to migrate to a new platform if the current provider cannot meet business requirements.
Flawed cost management
Organizations that do not exercise sufficient oversight may be surprised by the rising cost of cloud resources. They may not have considered the long-term consequences of scaling to address rising demand. Teams may need to accurately assess the cost before introducing new services to the environment.
The solution is to implement a cloud cost management strategy. Companies should monitor resource usage and set budget alerts to control costs. They should conduct comprehensive assessments before adding services to the account.
Inadequate disaster recovery planning
A lack of disaster recovery planning can result in substantial downtime, data loss, and negative customer relations. An unexpected outage can force a company to go out of business.
Organizations must implement a disaster recovery strategy that quickly recovers business-critical systems and data resources. The cloud offers customers enhanced resiliency if companies take the necessary steps to protect themselves with a viable and tested disaster recovery plan.
VAST’s Cloud Management Solutions
At VAST, we understand the importance of efficient cloud management for your business. We have multiple solutions that facilitate efficient cloud management, including the comprehensive VAST View cloud management and optimization platform. The tool streamlines migration to the cloud and helps manage the environment efficiently.
Our Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) provides a simple method of protecting your cloud environment. It leverages the power of AWS Elastic Data Recovery and provides advanced resiliency by enabling recovery in alternate geographic regions.
We also provide public cloud migration and support services where we manage and optimize your cloud environment so you can concentrate on core business activities. You do what you do best while we ensure your cloud environment meets all your requirements.
Contact the cloud experts at VAST, and let us help you avoid falling victim to common cloud management pitfalls.
