The cloud can offer significant benefits over in-house equivalents, whether hosting simple software apps or taking charge of entire business IT infrastructures.
However, the advantages will be undermined unless you take steps to optimize your use of the cloud resources you have at your disposal. With that in mind, here are some top tips that should help you avoid common cloud management mistakes.
Keep close watch of event logs to prevent problems proactively
If your cloud management techniques generally involve constantly small firefighting issues that seem to crop up out of nowhere, then you might be failing to pay heed to the warning signs that trouble is brewing.
This is where a syslog service can come in handy, both to help you take note of the potentially problematic events occurring within the cloud ecosystem and consolidate your overall log reporting and analysis.
With an approach that puts frequent log analysis and alerts at the top of the agenda, you should be able to keep cloud servers and platforms up and running smoothly for longer.
Study data movement to improve performance and reduce costs
Data is the lifeblood of any cloud infrastructure, and yet it is also an aspect that has the greatest role to play in determining how well a platform performs and how much it costs to operate.
In short, if data is being transferred without a good reason, this could create unwanted bottlenecks and also add to the expense of using the cloud in the first place. In particular, it is hybrid cloud setups where analyzing the movement of data can lead to actionable insights.
Say you have an app that is hosted remotely yet relies on a local server to act as the underlying database. This will invariably create more network traffic, which might stifle other services from running optimally. Offloading the database to the same cloud system as the app will free you from this burden.
Aim constantly to evolve your cloud deployment
Following on from the idea that you should continuously be monitoring key metrics relating to how your cloud resources perform, you should also be willing to make changes and embrace evolutions in the technology as and when this is necessary.
In the past, an on-premises IT setup would have had a limited shelf life, and the cloud lets you avoid many of the costs and complications of constant procurement planning. Nevertheless, you should still plan and be willing to shift more of your resources to the cloud if this makes sense.
Create a central policy to manage cloud use
Lastly, you need to make sure that everyone in the organization is on the same page regarding how your use of the cloud is handled to avoid inconsistencies across departments or even within individual teams.
This is important from a practical standpoint and when it comes to things like security and regulatory compliance.
