The benefits of cloud-based environments are obvious–speed of scale, agility and speed of deployment — these new IT infrastructures present a variety of challenges to be overcome in order to reap the benefits. The challenges are different in intensity depending on the type of industry, infrastructure and long-term objectives of an organisation. However, they may include app and data governance security, performance, and data issues.
The main challenge in cloud environments is achieving the desired level of elasticity in which the resources allocated to the applications perfectly match the demand. Ideally the resources are provided without any degradation in the application’s response time and enterprises only pay for what it uses. Despite these ideals, the these details reality is that a lot of cloud environments aren’t agile enough to handle peak load which causes increased latency and reduces the responsiveness of applications.
Another issue is ensuring that the right policies are in place to address concerns regarding compliance, security and governance. This requires policies compatible with regulatory frameworks as well as guidelines, including standards for storage and handling of data as well as security measures like monitoring, logging and security measures, such as threat detection and access controls.
Additionally, the absence of a defined procedure could result in a chaotic and inefficient cloud resource management and provisioning, potentially causing breaches of data and compliance violations. To prevent this from happening teams can establish budgetary controls and approval workflows to ensure they are using resources according to best practices and not wasting money on unused capacity.
By including cloud cost visibility into existing dashboards and identifying the waste caused by excessive permissions and regional misconfigurations and sticker shock, it is possible to be prevented. In addition, companies should create budgets that cap the cost of development infrastructure per month without limiting productivity.
