The question is – What can enterprises do to get more value from their cloud investments? The answer to this question requires businesses to completely rethink their operating models and talent mix, and adopt new tools such as AIOps. This may seem like a lot of work but it is necessary to do this to answer the question raised before. Also, a new discipline called CloudOps comes into play. Practicing CloudOps involve organizations automating, and optimizing their cloud-based operational processes to maintain their cloud ecosystems. Putting in this work enables organizations to be more proactive, achieve efficiency, and be effective eventually in the long run. Read on to find more about what is CloudOps and how to implement it and the associated benefits it can bring to your organization.

CloudOps Explained – What is CloudOps?

CloudOps, short of Cloud operations, combines ITOps and DevOps best practices as applied to various aspects of the cloud technology such as cloud architecture, network, security, software engineering etc. The aim of CloudOps is to optimize IT workloads and services while increasing agility, efficiency, availability, and flexibility of cloud technology to improve and accelerate business processes in order to boost business profitability. Cloudops borrows Devops best practices to centralize cloud operations from any operating environment. Some people see CloudOps as a continuation of ITOps but that would be a wrong perspective. A more fruitful way would be to consider CloudOps on its own stand and what it can do for an organization. As an extension of DevOps, CloudOps uses cloud computing tools to maintain continuous operations of applications hosted on the cloud. This results in shorter development cycles, reduced time for deployment to market, and improved software quality. This leads to a successful digital transformation strategy with higher levels of uptime, better quality of service, and consequently a more better and positive customer experience.

Implementing CloudOps

CloudOps is not a magic pill or a panacea to all your problems within the cloud. It has its own challenges and the effort is well worth it in the end for most adopters who have developed and adopted a well thought out cloud migration and transformation strategy. As always there is no such thing as a free lunch. There should be a paradigm shift across the entire organization when managing a CloudOps environmet as everyone right from employees and customers will be impacted by it.

Develop the right Cloud migration strategy

Get everyone prepared

Migrating and transitioning to cloud does not happen overnight. It requires proper planning to assess the costs, security risks, and procure management buy-ins.

Create a checklist of items

Prepare a checklist of items pertaining to the requirements and challenges specific to your organizations as cloud is not a one-size-fit-all. Ensure that adequate resources, staff, and budget are allocated to this checklist while maintaining current business continuity.

Properly choose the right cloud solution and vendor

There are different cloud solutions such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. You could also adopt a multi-cloud solution. Private clouds enable organizations to have complete control of data and security. Public clouds are more vulnerable to security risks while being easier to migrate to.

Enable and champion a cultural shift

Get the entire organization on board

Existing policies, procedures, and processes are not suitable for operating in the cloud. Get the entire organization onboard. Management and employees should be educated on the benefits and new procedures of going on the cloud.

Understand maintenance requirements

The maintenance requirements of having physical on-prem servers and infrastructure are different than that of the cloud. There is an acute need for teams to acquire cloud specific skills to work with the cloud vendors to maintain, troubleshoot, and deploy software applications on the cloud.

Benefits of CloudOps

Adopting a cloud based business model has some unique advantages over ones that require on-prem operations center. Cloud services are infinitely scalable, fault tolerant, and secure. The advantages of adopting CloudOps in your organization are outlined below:

Cost effective

Adopting cloud technology from a cloud vendor means that organizations not only save on infrastructure and hardware costs but also on the money typically spent on facilities, utilities, IT staff and other components. This makes the cost effectiveness of the cloud model appealing to most enterprise businesses.

Scalability, flexibility, and agility

Cloud services can scale resources such as storage, computers, and servers up and down as per demand. This ensures that organizations pay only for what they use. Creating and developing software applications becomes easy upon short notice as most cloud vendors provide cloud native tools to create them very easily. There will be no need for software development teams to wait for the IT staff to set up and configure the underlying infrastructure. This ensures adherence to the agile model of software development to create products and deliver services as per changing business needs.

Business continuity in the event of a disaster

Most cloud providers and vendors provide backup services of data created by businesses. In the event of disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes etc. the backup data in the data center located elsewhere becomes active ensuring business continuity. All cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Oracle maintain multiple backup copies of data, which can be made active in the event of any manmade or natural disaster.

Continuous Operations

Cloud model enables continuous operations, which means that business operations do not halt even for a moment even in the case of software updates and deployments.

Conclusion – Is CloudOps the future?

As more and more businesses migrate to the cloud with varying levels of success, adopting CloudOps has become imperative to realize the full potential of cloud for your organization. In the face of increasing complexity of cloud technology, CoudOps can help transform your organization by rethinking old operating models and processes to get your game up to the next level.