Today, almost every organization has already made their first steps towards introducing a cloud strategy in search of higher flexibility and business stability. However, few are the ones that manage to make a real impact on their operations and results through implementing cloud solutions.
If you believe you are not getting the most out of the cloud, let’s begin 2023 with a few key steps that can add value to your organization.
Step 1: Analyze Traffic – Peak and Throughs
The only way to set up the right cloud infrastructure for your organization is to estimate traffic and usage of resources in advance and to be ready to respond to peaks in demand. Depending on your activity, you might have a variety of sources of traffic by users, employees, and others. You need to be aware of these sources and know how any type of event could impact them. Depending on your organization’s activity, you may identify the following:
- Certain hours of the day when your employees are most active in using your CRM software, reporting tools, internal communication systems, etc.
- Periods of heavy traffic to your website and applications by external users
- A high volume of customer service requests on an irregular basis
- A peak in traffic and purchases during campaign periods
Pay attention to the impact of all the above on your infrastructure and the resources you rely on – CPU, memory, disk space, and more.
Choose a monitoring solution that can help you understand your traffic across on-premise and cloud infrastructures and that will offer you visibility over your entire infrastructure in a simple and meaningful way. Only then would you be taking advantage of actionable insights, performance management, and scalability opportunities.
Step 2: Analyze All Problems that Occurred in 2022
Yes, we live in the era in which cloud computing is booming but it is also bringing new concerns for organizations. Techworldtimes reports on key challenges that companies faced in cloud adoption in the past year, some of which were:
- Security issues that threatened sensitive corporate and business data
- Costs incurred due to poor cloud strategy and infrastructure management
- Scalability challenges while introducing new technologies and migrating more and more business processes to the cloud
- Lack of skills and experience to implement and manage cloud solutions in the organization
Was any of these an issue at your company? Make sure you know which are the pain points related to your digital transformation strategy and cloud infrastructure before you plan for any improvement.
Also, consider whether the public cloud might be the response. This type of solution can give you better control over data and can improve your security levels and your organization’s vulnerability at a reasonable cost and level of investment in infrastructure and other resources.
Step 3: Test to Figure Out the Breakpoints
Even if your infrastructure is stable enough against the current load, you must be aware of its potential. As soon as you begin implementing cloud solutions, make sure that everything works as expected and execute tests step by step.
While working on more and more complex projects it will become crucial for your developers to perform debugging in the cloud before going into production. Beware that even if you have simulated the process on your local environment, you might be surprised as soon as thousands of requests start being processed by a given program that you have released.
Another aspect that deserves attention is the trend for using modern system architecture and relying on the so-called “microservices”. Their benefits may be helpful, but they also introduce challenges in tracking and fixing bugs and errors.
Step 4: Perform Cost Analysis
It is not always about increasing investment to optimize business performance. Sometimes, it is about stopping leaks of cash flows that give no return. You might be surprised to find out that your cloud infrastructure does not use and does not need as many resources as you pay for.
If you identify a large number of unused cloud resources while analyzing your traffic sources and volume, then you have a great starting point to cut costs and increase your efficiency. If you have gone through all the steps above and ensure you get yourself covered for any scenario, you are ready to give up paying for some cloud resources until you really need them.
Step 5: Conduct Security Assessment
Data security is crucial to meet all stakeholders’ compliance requirements and is also part of the greatest issues faced by organizations today. However, if you ignore this step, you put your organization at risk of financial and reputation losses, decreased loyalty, and information leaks. Here is what you need to go through to secure your mission-critical business processes:
- Audit existing security policies and plans
- Review general management and operational processes
- Test network architecture and infrastructure
Make sure you are aware of all your vulnerabilities and address them promptly in your cloud strategy for 2023. Find a trusted Cloud provider to conduct cloud readiness assessment and secure your business continuity in case of a disaster.
Also, make sure that even if you experience a failure of your network or become the subject of malicious attacks, you can rely on a backup solution that will help you restore all your business-critical data and protect all your stakeholders. Disasters can strike at any time and can have a terrible impact on any business unless it has an enterprise disaster recovery response.
Grow with CloudScale 365
Talking about scalability, we draw your attention to CloudScale 365’s solutions that help enterprises design, deploy, and grow their cloud strategies. Here is the process we go through to enable high-performing and reliable cloud infrastructures for our partners:
- We analyze your cloud infrastructure – We understand that your business is unique and here is why we craft a custom approach towards your IT processes and infrastructure.
- We plan for growth – It is not about where you are, but where you want to go. Our approach considers your business’s current and future needs and ensures a smooth growth path and scalability.
- We build the right custom-fit solution – From IT and SaaS solutions to e-commerce and healthcare. Our cloud architects have the vast background and the right skill set that your business needs to adopt and grow a profitable cloud strategy.
- We test continuously– We need to make sure that the suggested approach, architecture, and solution are indeed the best fit for your organization’s needs. We perform tests together with your IT teams and verify that they are well-trained to support and manage the infrastructure.
- We secure your network – Don’t compromise any aspect of your data security and take advantage of our Enterprise Disaster Recovery and Backup solutions that will minimize your issues in case of an emergency.
- We deploy a working solution – Once the design and architecture have been approved by our customer, we onboard their project and make sure their infrastructure is well-secured and optimized for driving business growth.
At CloudScale 365 you will find a custom approach and end-to-end support for managing your cloud infrastructure to let you shorten applications’ development lifecycle and time to market. Trust our cloud architects and engineers to enable performance and stability while you focus on your organization’s core activity.
Ask an expert and learn how to boost your cloud strategy in 2023
