10 Steps to Building a New-Gen, Cloud-Focused Enterprise

In 2007 and 2008, many enterprises would never have considered putting their most precious and valuable applications into an entity that wasn’t located on-site. Now, in early 2017, companies aren’t looking back; they’re already doing test and dev, HR, accounting, marketing and dozens of other functions inside cloud-based services and getting excellent performance, security and return on investment as a result. A growing number are also putting their critical-biz apps into cloud services—apps such as money exchanges, medical imaging and big data-related research projects. This is trickling down to smaller and midrange-size businesses. In this eWEEK slide show, using industry information from cloud service management provider CloudHealth, a member of the AWS Marketplace, we bring you identifiers of companies that get it when it comes to using the cloud.

The overwhelming majority of cloud leaders have a role dedicated to cloud management (i.e., a “cloud steward”). This person is not a figurehead; they must have an intimate knowledge of the technology at play and the business as a whole.

Here, too, the cloud steward can come into play, because they are responsible for defining and enforcing cloud best practices, in addition to pushing for continuous optimization, accountability and smart growth.

These metrics will help track of progress over time and also enable you to measure your company against its peers. For this, consider organizations in similar industries and of similar size.

Unchecked spending, hyper-growth and siloed business groups can result in a fractured or partial view of the cloud. Consolidating visibility across public and private clouds, data centers and various point technology solutions can yield valuable insight by using big data analysis.

To maximize return on investment in cloud-based services, a cloud stakeholder must be able to understand spending by internal business group, allocate and forecast monthly spending, and amortize cost for it. This includes assets, services and service items.

“Cost management” can be a reductive term. That’s because in reality, cost is a function of performance, utilization and security, to name only a few factors.

As you scale cloud infrastructure, it’s easy to lose track of all the moving parts. Defining centralized governance rules while enabling decentralized management is key to running a secure, optimized cloud and to maintaining an agile business environment.

Policies that automate infrastructure schedules, rightsize workloads, and manage and modify reservations can simplify day-to-day management, reduce manual labor and eliminate the potential for human error.

The most efficient clouds require best practices defined at the organizational level. This is so IT can spend its time managing services and products instead of cloud ecosystems.

Optimization isn’t a one-time exercise. Revisit your metrics (see Slide 3) and perform ongoing analyses to see what changes will make an impact.