Ten Best Practices for Cloud Deployment

According to CompTIA, the IT trade association , 80% of businesses today claim that they are using some form of cloud solution that has virtual machines that can be enabled on demand, as well as easy-to-buy, easy-to-use application. "

Laura Maio, manager of Trend Micro Customer Solutions, believes there are currently three important trends driving the use and deployment of the cloud.

The first trend is that businesses use the public cloud as a natural extension of their internal environment.

The second trend is that business non-IT business units utilize public clouds to provide faster access to servers and storage resources.

Third, there is pressure in the enterprise IT department itself to build secure private cloud environments that function like public clouds in order to regain the trust of non-IT business units from public cloud providers. "

Ed Mahon, Vice President and CIO at Kent State University, a cloud computing believer, believes that only the IT department can use the cloud wisely. "We use an activity-based cost accounting approach to assess whether the in-house business should be moved to the cloud.For example, we've migrated the staff mailing service to Microsoft 365 and saved $ 650,000 annually." In addition, Mail migration to the cloud "also let us free up 30 servers."

For IT managers, using the cloud efficiently and safely is a challenge. After consulting with several cloud experts, we listed a list of the top ten cloud deployment best practices.

Best Practice # 1: Understand different types of clouds

Cloud is not a monstrous monster. In fact, the cloud that IT managers face is diverse; each cloud has its own characteristics and applications. Wise managers need to know in advance which cloud best suits them, and they can safely relocate their data out of corporate servers and firewalls.

Best Practice # 2: Evaluate your company's IT activities

In order to leverage the cloud effectively, IT managers must understand which applications to migrate to the cloud can bring benefits to their customers. Mahon of Kent State called this process "activity-based cost accounting," meaning to look closely at existing in-house applications and evaluate which applications move to the cloud more efficiently.

Best Practice # 3: No cloud is a panacea

After choosing the right cloud based on an activity-based cost assessment, IT managers must also carefully examine cloud providers and their applications to see if they can meet their needs. This is because "there is no single, all-encompassing cloud application that offers the best service for all customers," said John Howie COO of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). "So IT managers should carefully study various existing cloud options and work hard to match those options to their own needs, identifying the options that best suit their needs and the IT security system."

Best Practice # 4: Compliance Affects Cloud Options

Whether in the United States or in other countries, some information, usually financial and legal information, must be kept on the enterprise's own server. Failure to be aware of these "compliance requirements" could put corporate, institutional and government clients in serious legal issues and potentially lead to large fines.

"That's why we recommend hybrid clouds," said Jeetu Patel, general manager of Syncplicity, a cloud solution provider that supports secure file sharing and collaboration. "Data that needs regulatory compliance should remain in the organization and other information, such as public relations, safely and legally stored in the cloud."

Best Practice # 5: Changing Security with Redundancy

Do not be fooled by the "cloud," because after all we want to access and rely on others' servers, especially in IaaS environments. So IT managers have a responsibility to ensure that there is enough redundancy because the server is prone to downtime.

John Howie of CSA said, "If you really want to use the cloud securely, you should choose one or more providers that can store your files in multiple locations and provide multiple ways of accessing them, but we can not do that In order to be satisfied, you must also make sure that your files have multiple copies in the cloud, and there should be a synchronization between these copies in order to ensure that all files are updated synchronously when one file is updated, so that even if one of the copies fails, It will not affect the network connection and business operations. "

Best Practice # 6: Review your service provider carefully

Just like cloud is not a monster, so do all cloud providers. IT managers need to carefully examine what exactly each cloud provider can offer and what resources and guarantees they really want to support.

"In fact, the problem of cloud security is less serious, because most cloud providers are serious about security," said Dave Elliott, product marketing manager at Symantec Cloud Business Unit. "But we still need to figure out exactly what backup support each provider has and what recovery plan to keep your employees on regular cloud data in the event of a primary downtime."

Best Practice # 7: Applications must be migrated to the cloud in the right way

It is important that you do this when migrating your in-house applications to the cloud, which should be systematic, well-planned, and tested step by step. It would be dangerous to think that simply by uploading the app to the cloud, with only a few minor configuration changes, everything would be OK.

Unfortunately, the above approach is quite commonplace with some new cloud users, and Michael Kopp, a cloud strategist at the Copmpuware APM contact center, sees this as the worst mistake related to cloud deployment.

"Moving existing applications into the cloud without thinking about the necessary changes is likely to lead to performance degradation, service outages, and increased costs," said Kopp. "The migration of applications must be very cautious and take into account the benefits of the cloud in anticipation of what changes are necessary in order to adapt to the cloud environment. Only in this way can you gain the benefits of flexibility and cost savings."

Best Practice # 8: Maximize cloud security by maintaining customer satisfaction

As Trend Micro's Laura Maio points out, a trend that drives cloud deployments is that employees tend to bypass the IT department to deploy cloud services themselves. They do this because some IT private cloud policies make it more difficult to use a private cloud than a less secure public cloud resource.

"To be successful, a company's private cloud must provide users with the same availability as a public cloud," said Patel of Syncplicity. "To do this, IT managers should complement the use of the cloud with VPNs and firewalls to prevent only handy users from placing sensitive data in a public cloud that is vulnerable to compromise."

Best Practice # 9: Stay tuned for cloud events

After the app is migrated to the cloud, it does not mean that the IT department can no longer manage it and can only focus on other things. You know, even the best cloud providers can make mistakes. That is why senior IT managers must keep an eye on the company's applications and data in the cloud and deal with issues before the problems can get worse. As Kopp cautions: "Using the cloud without proper monitoring and application performance management is tantamount to blindly flying in the cloud."

Best Practice # 10: Clouds do not mean that you can shirk your responsibilities

The last, and most important, cloud best practice is to accept that cloud content is in fact very much in the hands of an IT manager's day-to-day work, and what is stored in the cloud is exactly the same thing that was previously stored on an in-house server.

Migration of applications and data to the cloud does not mean that IT managers can remove their responsibilities. Doing so simply changes the nature of the job responsibilities and turns it into a responsibility to be shared with cloud providers.

"Using cloud services is like renting an apartment," says Maio. "Do not expect the landlord to help you clean the room, fix your furniture (for example, to help you patch and security updates.) But you can expect the landlord to fix the pipes or lines (to keep the physical infrastructure functioning), etc. From a cloud provider From the angle of view, it is the consumer's responsibility to ensure the consistency of the application running in the cloud, not the cloud provider's responsibility. "

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