How to manage your Cloud Infrastructure

If the cloud infrastructure is not managed well, it can fall victim to outages just like every other digital system or service. And as you can imagine, these kind of issues have serious consequences that can be felt throughout the entire company. That’s why your relationship with your cloud infrastructure deserve a lot of attention.

The risks of a poorly managed cloud infrastructure

If you run your digital business on a poorly managed could infrastructure, your end-customer experience can be negatively affected in regards to your brand reputation and trustworthiness, especially if security incidents occur. Additionally, you run the risk of serious hits to your organic traffic if you fail to offer 24/7 availability, or the performance of your digital services simply doesn’t meet market standards.

The right way to manage your cloud infrastructure

To guard your digital business against downtime many useful and powerful features can be implemented in your cloud solution, taking your business processes and risk model into account of course. Reliability is key in order to guarantee a good customer experience and provide opportunities for your organization to properly do business.

Luckily, cloud providers such as Amazon Webservices and Microsoft Azure offer a different range of solutions, straight out-of-the-box. When stripped to their core, they all focus on the same principles. To give you an idea of how these valuable features actually function in cloud infrastructure setups we’ve simplified the technical part and key features, to serve as examples:

• Auto-Healing: As the name implies, this technique checks the health of your system and repairs the broken parts automatically.
• Auto-Scaling: This technique checks the capabilities and performance of your system, and scales them up or down accordingly to maximize efficiency.

Solutions offered by cloud providers still need to be implemented, monitored and managed, in order to ensure reliability and keep the costs under control. It’s important to understand that cloud management can have different meanings, depending on your perspective as a customer.

Calculating potential costs

Every cloud provider offers their own tool for calculating the costs, for example our partner's AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

Although these calculators may look straight forward, additional variables from customer behaviour data and technical monitoring data need to be considered in order make a proper estimation of the costs over a longer period of time.

Cost efficiency

One of the most underestimated routines in cloud management is working towards cost efficiency. Reserving instances for a longer period of time, pre-paid or no-upfront payments, standard or convertible reservations, automated environment cost saving scripts, these are all just a few examples that can greatly improve your cloud management. Cloud hosting will be only less expensive than on-premise solutions when you understand all the ins and outs of the game. And at Digital Continuity, we know how to play this game very well.