Cloud Operations (CloudOps)

Cloud Operations (CloudOps) refers to any managerial activities related to the continuous updates or optimizations of IT services being run through a public cloud. In other words, CloudOps is the process of identifying and following appropriate operational procedures to optimize IT services within any given cloud environment.

CloudOps Functions
The functions of the CloudOps team within an organization require a wide range of skill sets across an organization, including IT operations and other IT teams, DevOps teams, business application operation teams and cloud service providers. The overarching objectives of CloudOps are to:

• Keep cloud services and cloud infrastructure up and running.
• Optimize performance and capacity — ensuring that the cloud budget isn’t expended on wasted space or idle resources and keeping tabs on operational costs.
• Meet service-level agreements.
• Manage compliance as well as configuration.
• Make sure there are proper recovery and mitigation measures in place.

Effective Implementation of CloudOps
While CloudOps offers many benefits, we all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. For most adopters, the effort is well worth it in the end. But implementing CloudOps is not without its challenges. Some of the roadblocks you may encounter when attempting to implement CloudOps include:

• Budget overruns caused by idle or underused space
• Security risks due to improper system configurations
• Governance issues as a result of rapid deployment

Fortunately, you can mitigate these risks and fully realize the value of CloudOps by first taking the time to develop a solid cloud migration strategy that addresses all the complexities of cloud. As a follow-up step, we recommend visualizing your entire network structure to gain a holistic view of how all your systems work together. You generally need a suite of ops management tools to abstract you away from the complexity of CloudOps. Otherwise, you may have difficulty tracking all the systems during operations, which can impact your response time. CloudOps is a proactive operation. You need an ongoing analytical process to predict and correct issues before they impact users. You can automate these activities by collecting and analyzing data over time to identify patterns

Benefits and Challenges of CloudOps

Benefits of CloudOps
With a focused CloudOps strategy, companies can experience several benefits, including the following.

• Cost-effective: By using cloud infrastructure that is hosted by a third party, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to purchase and maintain expensive hardware. In addition to hardware savings, you could also see savings from facilities, utilities, and other costs associated with maintaining a large physical space for a data center.
• Scalable and flexible: Cloud capacity can be expanded at any time. If you need extra bandwidth, cloud-based services can take care of you immediately. Your team is free to work on other business matters rather than working to find extra space or configure new hardware.
• Helps automate processes: The cloud provides several tools that help you to automate activities such as infrastructure provisioning, creating builds, running quality assurance tests, generating reports, and more. Using the cloud to automate processes ultimately leads to the reduction of time to market.
• Increases security: Cloud-hosting services spend most of their time monitoring security to ensure that your data and services are safe from cybercriminals. According to RapidScale, 94% of businesses saw improvement in security after moving to the cloud.
• Simplifies backup management and disaster recovery: Your data isn’t stored onsite. Cloud-based systems provide opportunities for storing your data in multiple locations. This means that the cloud is fault-tolerant and offers several failover options to protect your data.
• Accessible: Your team can access and manage your cloud operations from almost anywhere using almost any device, regardless of platform.
• Makes integration seamless: Applications that share common services can co-exist in the cloud without being interconnected.
• Enables continuous operations: Software can be updated and quickly deployed without disrupting services, meaning that operations in the cloud are always available for use.

Challenges of CloudOps
While there are a lot of benefits associated with the cloud, you may encounter a few challenges as you delve in the operations of managing your cloud, including:

• Budget overruns: If you have idle or underused space, you could end up overspending on your cloud budget. Businesses are wasting up to 35% of their cloud budget because of inefficiencies, wasted space, and idle resources.
• Security risk: While cloud services keep underlying systems secure, you still need to ensure that you have proper security configurations in place to keep your system secure.
• Governance: Ironically, the benefit of being able to quickly and easily deploy updated or new resources can be a challenge. Rapid deployment can lead to a lack of governance and compliance.