Why you need a ‘pit team’ for your public cloud services
Keeping your cloud services at optimum performance long-term can feel like an endless loop of testing, enhancing and refining. Learn the top things you should focus on to help prioritise your time.
You’ve made the move, but what is next for your cloud?
You’ve gone beyond conducting proofs of concept and are now running production workloads in the public cloud. Perhaps, like around half of Australian IT departments, you had to spin up new environments in a hurry, to meet recent demands for supporting flexible working environments. Or new demand spikes meant that running web services on-premises was no longer viable for delivering excellence in customer support.
So what now? The truth is – regardless of why or how fast you needed to migrate – putting your IT into the cloud can be like adding a new aerodynamic feature to a Formula 1 car. You have to keep testing, enhancing and refining to make sure the car is fully optimised at all times. If you don’t, you risk falling behind and losing seconds off your lap time.
What you need is someone to ‘handle the run’ – the same way F1 drivers rely on their pit team and support crew to maximise their speed on the track.
Ensuring best practice public cloud usage
Public cloud providers currently offer around 1,400 services and they’re adding new ones all the time. This creates a ‘noise’ which can distract your internal IT team because they can’t possibly remain across every innovation. You’ll miss out on understanding then acting on opportunities to cut cloud costs, enhance performance or optimise governance.
Interactive’s ‘hive’ of 200 brains focused on cloud operations are constantly across every aspect of public cloud development and their practical application across a variety of scenarios and industry sectors. While you may have one or two internal specialists, it may be difficult for them to respond and deploy as quickly as a managed cloud services provider when new services or innovations are rolled out.
We also work across multiple public cloud environments – Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services – as well as private cloud. This means we can keep the plates spinning and recommend hybrid or multi-cloud deployment; whichever is your best course to steer.
Maintaining your security posture in public cloud
Understanding your options under your corporate compliance requirements and security posture can place you in an unsafe situation, fast. This can result in gaps in your public cloud architecture for hackers to exploit.
It only takes ticking one wrong box when provisioning to put your data sovereignty at risk – you’d be surprised how many Australian workloads end up in Singapore, simply because it’s just up from Sydney when selecting where you want your workplace instance located.
When racing, it takes extensive experience to know you’re on the apex and it’s time to accelerate safely. Similarly, you need experience to optimise and fine tune your cloud deployment to remain as safe as you can be and maintain governance and security at an acceptable level.
Interactive’s approach is to gain a deep understanding of your specific compliance requirements and security posture, so we remain alert to any changes in your chosen cloud environment that present risk. We keep them alive and updated, maintaining a blueprint of what’s acceptable to your business. We also leverage our economies of scale – because when something changes it will affect several of our customers. Having us at your back enables you to be proactive rather than reactive.
Negotiating the ‘unknown unknowns’ of public cloud
You fill your car with petrol and might be perfectly capable of changing a battery or spark plug, but attempting to tune its ignition or recondition its gearbox could end in disaster. The same way that F1 drivers are completely reliant on their pit crew to keep their cars running at optimum in differing track conditions, you need the in-depth experience and advice of people who ‘live in the clouds’.
It’s very easy to spin up a workload or two, but if you are going to base the very foundations of your ICT infrastructure in public cloud you need it to be able to scale. Once you’ve proved the concept, there are many complexities to overcome in order to cope with growth.
The ideal is to visualise ahead and build appropriate foundations from day one. The consequences of not doing so will result in unnecessary costs, inadequate performance and unacceptable risks over time. When you’ve never done it before, it pays to seek the advice of those who specialise in it on behalf of hundreds of other businesses.
Cloud management pays for itself
So much ‘noise’ in public cloud innovation makes it extremely difficult for IT teams to keep up with any new opportunities or continuous improvements on offer – let alone precisely how to best take advantage of them to cut costs and reduce business risk. This is why having a team of experts with an intimate understanding of your specific needs lets you be proactive rather than reactive.
We free you to work on business enablement and the next big thing – rather than the boring day-to-day management stuff. That said, we don’t treat our knowledge like a secret blueprint. We happily transfer knowledge to your team and upskill them in the mysteries of public cloud.
Essentially, we add value because we’re ‘race experienced’ – deeply involved in public cloud for so long that we know how to avoid the pitfalls. This helps speed decisions to exploit opportunities for reducing costs and risks. The result for our Managed Cloud Services customers is lower TCO and higher return on their public cloud investment.
