Telecom & Technology Consulting
If you’ve been in the technology game long enough, you’re well aware that every “innovation” isn’t necessarily innovative. But certain new approaches and processes do fit the bill of being transformative.
For example, some years ago the tech community was introduced to DevOps, an approach that combined software development and IT operations to speed up the development lifecycle.
Now a related and equal valuable idea has emerged called CloudOps. Similar to DevOps, CloudOps manages all IT services and workloads running in the cloud. No matter if you’re employing a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or private cloud strategy, CloudOps creates best practices for the cloud in the same way DevOps does for software development.
Think of CloudOps as a multilayered framework. The first layer is a governance layer that includes financial operations. A cloud application layer encompasses how you will deploy and manages applications. The cloud foundations layer includes identity, network management, backup management, and other monitoring functions. The final layer is a security layer.
While CloudOps may sound good in theory, you’re justified in asking about its practical uses. Consider CloudOps, first and foremost, for application delivery, which may be perfect timing for companies who have prioritized their digital initiatives.
CloudOps provides a number of benefits. It fosters adoption and usage of the cloud, which in turn boosts your ability to experiment and innovate with new services and technology. And in yet another benefit of this domino effect, companies become more agile, leading to faster time to market, as well as better management and financial control over their increasing amount of cloud services.
On a much more micro level, CloudOps allows you to establish schedules for proper resource allocation based on performance and cost considerations. In addition, you’re able to scale cloud services without impacting quality of service. All which means that a dedicated CloudOps team will have incentive to manage operating costs.
Every enterprise will obviously have its own specific goals with a CloudOps approach. But no matter the objectives, CloudOps enables a more proactive, rather than reactive, approach to technology operations. You empower your IT teams to innovate and look to the future instead of spending the majority of their time with maintenance and troubleshooting. As such, teams gain confidence that applications will perform just as well in pre-production as they will when released to actual users.
Yes, CloudOps delivers an array of hard and soft benefits, but as with any technology (or technological approach) that’s still maturing, you have to keep adapting. You have to adjust to changes in the cloud landscape to maintain an edge.
That’s to be expected – there’s a serious learning curve for even the most skilled IT pros. And as enterprises undertake multi-cloud deployments, their CloudOps implementations must mature and scale. This is crucial, as many companies currently manage their cloud environments in silos; they use different tools to manage each cloud landscape, which makes it almost impossible to get a complete view of their entire cloud infrastructure. For maximum efficiency, you need to create a CloudOps approach that easily integrates with new cloud providers and services.
To maximize the results of your CloudOps operation, you must also develop a culture that supports this approach to cloud operations. To that end, CloudOps can’t be perceived as just one team that works among themselves. Instead, CloudOps combines the IT, security, and application development departments, enabling collaboration to achieve shared goals. You won’t realize the true value of CloudOps if teams work in silos.
The technology industry will never stop promoting the Next Big Thing. And it’s okay to be skeptical. But anything that enhances security automates and streamlines workflows, and enables faster deployment has to be worthy of consideration. That’s CloudOps. Used correctly, it will help you maximize the effectiveness of your entire cloud operation.
