As I mentioned in my last post, organizations increasingly use multiple cloud services and hybrid clouds .
Boosting cloud security with infrastructure and standards
Cloud services providers are also deploying new cloud technologies like automation, microservices, containers, and so on, that boost cloud performance and make public cloud services as secure, or even more secure, than traditional on-premises environments .
Those clouds: an extension of your customers’ data centers
These days, the right cloud services provider will be able to offer your customers access to its cloud(s) via a web-based portal that uses a secure SSL infrastructure and strong account credentialing. The Quest Cloud Platform ™, for one, does this and also provides virtual firewall and IDS/IPS/malware services.
Still, it’s important that your customers appreciate their own roles in the ongoing security and performance of their ever-more-cloudified IT environments.
This begins with appreciating that their public and hybrid cloud deployments function as extensions of, and/or substitutes for, their own data centers. So even if they use a complete cloud platform like the Quest Cloud Platform, they need to pay attention to access privileges , app visibility , application development , etc.
4 cloud best practices
What’s more, you can help your customers’ cloud efforts succeed by encouraging them toward these four cloud best practices:
1 Get the network environment cloud-ready
Moving applications to the cloud(s) almost invariably leads to significant changes in an organization’s network environment as data centers are augmented or replaced by cloud tenancies and co-location facilities hosting a population of endpoints.
Bringing in a technology consultant with both cloud and networking expertise – and doing so early in your customers’ cloud planning – can save plenty in headaches and money.
2 Relieve cloud complexity
Those new technologies that ease cloud management and integration make for higher levels of cloud complexity under the cloud platform hood.
When your customers struggle to manage their clouds and control their costs, a technology consultant with strong cloud expertise can help you help your customers choose and deploy the cloud platforms and technologies best-suited to their needs and goals.
3 Review cloud policy and management
Your customers’ multiple clouds mean multiple cloud services providers, which makes unifying the management of your customers’ cloud policy very important.
The right technology consultant can assist you as you work with your customers to adapt their cloud policy to streamline management and to restructure processes to work more effectively with preferred cloud architectures and ecosystems.
4 Consider managed services
Regardless of the cloud platform or infrastructure supporting your customers’ workloads, their end-users’ application experience needs to be consistent. So it may be worthwhile to point your customers to managed services platforms for:
- Consistent SLAs (Service Level Agreements) across all clouds and premises;
- Governance, risk, and compliance assurance;
- Automated migration and seamless workload portability; and
- Designed-in security and privacy.