Common Cloud Management Challenges Faced by Enterprises

Taking control of the management of cloud operations on an enterprise isn't easy. Here are some of the most cited issues that managment of cloud infrastructures face. 

Hybrid Cloud Model

For operating a hybrid cloud model, the underlying application, integrations and data architectures need to be revisited, sometimes tweaked, and other times overhauled. New tools for deployment, monitoring, and management are required. Managers in charge of maintaining the Hybrid IT environments seek to ensure the availability of the complex set of skills, tools and processes needed to manage hybrid infrastructure on a consistent, global scale.

Hybrid IT Infrastructure

The management and optimization of a hybrid IT infrastructure are proving to be a challenge. While IT teams must develop new skills to collaborate more closely, several of them would also like to leverage the skills of the experienced and expert-managed technology services providers who can design and deliver optimized hybrid IT solutions at a quicker pace.

RBAC Mechanism

As enterprises adopt more and more cloud-based applications, they need to be able to provision and de-provision both apps and users fast enough to keep up with business requirements, while maintaining tight security and compliance through identity management. Managers aim to ensure data governance by restricting access to resources through RBAC mechanism where users and groups can be granted different roles and assign permissions to those roles.

Single Sign-On (SSO)

Support for authentication and access management methods are necessary to ensure users use their corporate accounts for Single Sign-On (SSO) to enable increased visibility, auditing, and control over access to cloud resources. Whether it's provisioning, meeting compliance requirements, or simply reducing the number of help desk calls, SSO plays an integral role in efficient enterprise IAM.

Simplified Orchestration

Regular users of infrastructure resources seek simplified orchestration and templates that allow operators to configure a server once and reuse that configuration reliable and repeatable to provision more servers. This avoids repetitive manual tasks when the DevOps staff could be adding value to the business and has the added benefit to restrict the service availability and resource types to what's available in the stack.

Resource-Based Tagging

Enterprises seek to place accountability and ownership on the cloud users by enforcing an abstract grouping mechanism like "Resource-based Tagging" that can be used to associate resources with a particular department or functional team.

Data Governance

Cloud resources can be spread among many cloud services making it hard to track and account. This problem is compounded by the fact that workers may engage cloud services without the IT department's knowledge. Thus, Shadow IT is not just a risk but actual issue to deal with. The IT team should have tools to avoid shadow IT by having access to a centralized pane of glass that adheres to the first rule of data governance — to know what you have and where it is.

Optimize Cloud Cost

IT Managers rely on useful and timely data about the utilization statistics of cloud resources to make the decisions necessary to optimize cost and usage. They will use this information to optimize and find the "best execution venues" for cloud workloads by weighing factors like performance, reliability, cost, and security and then matching appropriate solutions to enterprise priorities.

Automated Alerts and Notifications

Enterprise seeks automated policies, rules, and schedulers to keep costs from spiraling up, by automatically shutting down QA and Dev servers outside of business hours or terminating unused volumes to reduce costs, and automatically right-sizing the VMs based on their monitored utilization. Automated alerts and notifications about authorization failures, budget overruns, cost spikes, and untagged infrastructure result in increased visibility and accountability to the Enterprise stakeholders.

Real-Time Dashboard

Stakeholders need to access dashboards with real-time actionable data. The visibility gained into the cloud consumption patterns enables analysis in terms of the cost implications, usage trends, performance thresholds, and security implications. This provides managers with an opportunity to evaluate and optimize the infrastructure across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

Finally, organizations require automated IT showback and chargeback capabilities that provide timely, accurate transparency into how your IT resources are being consumed, who's consuming them, and at what cost – all rolled up into a single bill of IT.

If the above needs of hybrid IT are addressed, then enterprises can realize not only IT cost savings and efficiencies, but also overall business growth objectives, and increased agility and innovation by leverage the flexible scalability of public clouds, along with the security and control of their own private infrastructure.