How to face cloud management challenges

To stay current in today’s digital environment, businesses and governments aim to accelerate their digital strategies. Cloud management empowers organizations to make the best use of their cloud resources. Whether you’re using an on-premises, hybrid or multi-cloud model, cloud management is crucial to getting the most from your cloud investment.

Allocate spending

Assign team members or departments to each cloud service and keep them accountable for budget reporting. This allows for each service to have custom spend tracking instead of an all-inclusive spending report that takes hours to run through. Breaking down pricing enables proactive budget reporting and accountability. Once an organization tracks spending, they can use the data to understand trends and project expected cost needs.

Automation

Due to complex pricing methods, monitoring unnecessary costs can be overwhelming. Instead, allow for automated processes to track pricing and services. This enables organizations to eliminate unnecessary services or resources.

Why cloud management and what are the benefits?

There are numerous benefits to cloud management including security, flexibility, scalability and cost savings. Through cloud management, you gain improved control over your cloud resources, enable seamless, secure integration with other systems and can scale computing resources up or down based on demand.

In addition, many cloud management platforms have reporting dashboards that provide analytics across the cloud environment. These analytics offer business insights to help IT leaders make informed decisions. A few benefits of cloud optimization platforms are:

• Security: As organizations transition cloud data, either from on-premise or private cloud, security is top of mind. Security management oversees and analyzes threats to an organization’s cloud. Security software helps identify what information to store in a public or private cloud based on sensitivity. Cloud managers have the responsibility to keep an organization’s information safe and implement preventative safeguards.
• Flexibility: Dashboard data can be utilized to analyze performance and determine a best-fit resource. This gives organizations the flexibility to not only scale up or down but right-size. Based on key metrics, an organization can right-size its cloud computing environment to maximum efficiency that lessens the cost of services.
• Cost savings: Cloud management services allow for organizations to customize their service offerings. Organizations can save money by not paying for services they don’t need. An effective cloud management team should save an organization time and labor costs.

Hybrid, multi-cloud management

A multi-cloud model involves using two or more public cloud services, while a hybrid cloud model includes private and public cloud resources. As you can imagine, cloud management becomes even more important in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. In some industries, regulatory compliance requirements add complexity to managing hybrid clouds. For example, some regulations require certain data to be housed only in private cloud resources versus in the public cloud.

However, it is vital to keep up with changing regulations because having a multi or hybrid cloud enables an organization to have a faster time to market while decreasing risk. Multi-cloud can increase efficiency, manage, and monitor its environment through private, public, and hybrid clouds.

Read more about how Unisys approaches Cloud Management.