If you’re a cloud computing consumer then ask yourself the following questions:

• Am I leveraging the cloud’s ability to scale with my business?
• Is my current cloud footprint tuned to my business?
• Am I getting the availability I expect from my cloud?
• Are my systems secure enough on the cloud?
• Am I gaining the results I expected?
• Am I using the right cloud tools and solutions?

Can you answer all of them? If not then you probably need to pay more attention to these key aspects of cloud management. To start optimizing your cloud operations today, join Newvem for free.

Enhancing Visibility

In IaaS (infrastructure as a service) the cloud provider owns the infra-structure, and has visibility over the whole stack of computing resource. As the cloud consumer you buy the Service, and any visibility you get is bound into it. Numerous APIs allow one to achieve good visibility of the Service itself, but not what lies beneath it. The challenge is to achieve visibility down to the lower layers – to the underpinning stack of compute resources.

Improving Control

The control one gets in IaaS is focused on the service and its utility aspects. Control of the resources beneath “the covers” is limited by one’s lack of visibility and by the ability to measure and act on the service.

Assessing Performance and Availability

Variability and uncertainty counter the flexibility one gains from an on-demand scheme. Utility computing requires management of resources as a utility – constantly balancing between available capacity, provisioned capacity, and utilization.

Enabling Cost Containment

Recognizing the balance between available capacity, provisioned capacity, and utilization is experienced at its highest intensity when looking at the financial aspects. Awareness of the details of the utility model becomes essential to enable cloud consumers to optimize the benefits derived from a pay-as-you-go scheme.

Supporting Compliance

Organizations subject to tight regulation and complex compliance requirements face compliance issues relating to their own processes and applications on the one hand (the part of the stack that they control), and the compliance state of infrastructure providers on the other hand (the portion of the stack that is off-limits). Matching both sides of the compliance equation is not always possible and is certainly not a straightforward operation.

Addressing Access Control and Privacy Concerns

There are recurring concerns relating to the accessing and use of services over the internet, these become even more significant when one’s core business functions are moved out-of-premises.

Facilitating Change Management

Migration paths, setup procedures and maintenance requirements need to factor in the extra complexity created by the multidimensional sprawl that the cloud brings with it.

Improving Manageability

Reducing overheads, time and effort; compensating for the lack of standards and supporting and enabling new practices by accelerating learning curves are all pathways to bettering manageability.

Keywords: enhancing visibility, cloud tools, cloud solutions, IaaS, cloud ability, secure cloud, cloud management, cloud operations, cloud providers.