Does Planning Ahead Simplifies Cloud Management?

Today many businesses are looking at moving to the cloud to take advantage of easier administration and lower operating expenses. It's a belief that shifting to a cloud solution would vanish the role of IT in management. But the truth is they're still responsible for a lot. By knowing the underlying concepts of how to tackle the responsibilities makes cloud management obligations significantly easier.

Different Clouds, Different Duties

IT management duties may vary depending on specific kind of service and utilization of Cloud.

Users of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions, for example, don’t have to worry about hardware maintenance but remain on the hook for pretty much everything else. You still have to manage the underlying operating system and the applications on top of it.. That can be difficult, he notes, if your IaaS provider doesn’t support the management tools you use to administer on-premises systems.

Administrative tools can also be an issue with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, which take operating system management off of your hands but still leave you responsible for application support. “If you don’t have the right tools, there’s no way to monitor and manage performance, so you can’t be sure what kind of experience your users are having in the different regions you serve,” Schutz notes.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions free administrators from both OS and application oversight, but can pose thorny identity management challenges. This puts the burden to find and disable what could be dozens of accounts across all of the SaaS products your company uses squarely on the IT staff’s shoulders.

Rules to Manage By

Businesses can simplify their role in managing whatever cloud services they deploy by following a few basic guidelines:

Pick cloud solutions that support existing tools.

Whenever possible, look for cloud services that you can administer with the same tools you use to manage the rest of your infrastructure. you have “Otherwise to learn and potentially buy new systems, which can be disruptive and expensive,” observes Schutz. Companies familiar with Microsoft’s System Centre management suite, for example, can use that product to administer both their in-house and Microsoft-based cloud solutions.

Budget some time for staff training.

Managing cloud solutions isn’t more difficult than managing on-premises solutions – it’s just different. Implementation plans should include time for learning about those differences,There’s plenty of information out there,You’ve got to dedicate the time and institutionalize the knowledge transfer.

Asking your cloud partners for tips early in the implementation process can give you a head start on that process. “Figure out from your software vendor what other customers have had challenges with, and make sure you plan ahead for all of those things,”