Need to be Different: Key Performance Indicators for Cloud

My last article on “ Few Tips To Unleash Cloud benefits ” has generated lot of interest and many queries came in, to discuss next step after applications deployment on Cloud especially on  “What should be the Critical Areas with the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the success?”.

After Deployment of applications on Cloud using the Cloud operating model with right functions, processes and tools as mentioned in my last article, now it’s the time to think how we measure the success of the same.

In my opinion, there are 4 critical areas with Key Performance Indicators which should be focused on to measure the success:

1.)   Governance: It’s the most important area to look at, to have right visibility of complete deployed cloud landscape to have better control to align with security and compliance requirement of the firm. KPIs to be defined under below sub-sections:

• Visibility: Ensure measurement for Accuracy of CMDB with latest cloud Inventory – IaaS, PaaS & SaaS.
•  Control: WHO does WHAT. Must to have User/Service Catalog Management process for monitoring On-boarding & Decommissioning of Cloud Services, Tagging strategy which is enforced and monitored on a periodic basis for proper CMDB. Need to capture and flag violations on a dashboard for remediation of the same.
• Compliance: Set KPIs to avoid any violation of compliance items - RBAC, IAM Policy, ACL, Encryption, Patching, AV, Backups, Industry Standards.

 2.)   Agility & Performance: These are key benefits which Cloud has to offer and we must measure this to take appropriate actions to enable or improve the speed to the business, scalability and elasticity or flexibility to provide better performance and end user experience. KPIs to be defined and measured for the followings:

• Speed: Ensure a way to measure improvement in provisioning time of Iaas, Paas & Saas.
•  Application Performance: Have a system to measure End user experience, application health and performance.
•  Burst Management: Auto scaling for enhanced load and performance.
•  Service Availability: Number of service interruptions.

 3.)   Automation : Automation and Orchestration is the backbone of the Cloud, so it’s very important to measure the level of automation used for achieving the right outcomes like :

•  Resource Optimization: Automated right sizing, scale up/down with demand, Auto- Shutdown during off-peak hours, removing old volume snapshots.
• Resource Health: Automatic replacement of unhealthy instances with healthy ones.
•  Secure Workload Automation: Guardrails in place to ensure users provision secure and compliant application environments.

 4.)   Cloud Optimization: This is all about eliminating and/or avoiding the wastage and keeping the environment right size at any point of time without impacting the application performance and end-user experience.

•  Bill Watch/Budget Variance: Management and monitoring of monthly provider bills.
• Right Size/Type: Monitoring the utilization of Compute/Store per application/ environment & advise. Right subscription Model.
• Enhanced Cloud Adoption: Measure the usage of native/open sources to reduce transition time of new services. Include managed services as new services and enhanced features emerge in existing services.

Last but not the least, its importance to have right Cloud Skilled resources with experience of using the right tools be it native or any 3rd party, to understand the key performance area as per the landscape and define/identify the KPIs to measure the outcome and take appropriate actions to realize the Cloud benefits.