The Annual Performance Review for your Cloud Environment

Where is your organization in its cloud journey? Perhaps you facilitated its migration to a cloud architecture several years ago and so far, it seems as though everything is operating like a well-oiled machine. Or maybe you’ve only recently begun moving applications to the cloud and are still discovering the features and benefits offered by the major cloud service providers (CSPs). Or like many enterprises, you may now be moving past cloud migration and on to strategy.

Regardless, our experience with a diverse mix of cloud users from across all industries and at varying levels of cloud adoption has taught us something all users have in common:

There is always room for improvement. 

That’s right. No matter how smoothly you think your environment is running or how much you’ve managed to improve processes and increase your organization’s efficiency, you have the opportunity to do it even better. Here’s how.

Establish a Well-Architected Framework from the start

For those in the planning phase of cloud migration, you will want to partner with a provider that uses a set of standard best practices to plan and implement your cloud environment. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure have both labeled these best practices The Well-Architected Framework, which consists of five pillars of architecture excellence:

1. Cost Optimization
2. Operational Excellence
3. Performance Efficiency
4. Reliability
5. Security

When architecting technology solutions on AWS and Azure, incorporating these pillars into your architecture helps produce the most secure, high-performing, resilient and efficient infrastructure for your applications. This not only allows you to focus on the other aspects of design, such as functional requirements, but it also helps ensure that you’re building a system that will meet up to your expectations and requirements.

Maintain the most stable and efficient systems

Your cloud environment is ever-changing. Between new instances, changing security groups, and updated service offerings, it can sometimes feel impossible to stay abreast of the latest and greatest. That’s why whether you’re a cloud newbie or a veteran, your business will benefit from conducting a Well-Architected Review every 12 months. The Well-Architected Review is a systematic approach to evaluating AWS and Azure architectures in order to identify and fix potential issues with the environment and guarantee that it is optimized for financial and operational efficiencies.

It can be difficult for time-crunched and overburdened IT departments to successfully perform these reviews. Outsourcing some of the more time-consuming and complex tasks of cloud management has become an attractive option for many organizations. Lightstream Cloud Managed Services offers its customers the annual performance of Well-Architected Reviews as a proactive way to shed light on any security, operational and performance issues, as well as to make sure that the organization is maximizing every opportunity for savings and automation.

Lightstream’s four areas of key management for cloud platforms are security, finance, technology and operational expertise. These key areas just happen to align perfectly with the pillars of architecture excellence that AWS and Azure abide by, which to reiterate are security, cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency and reliability. The fact that Lightstream’s core values are so in sync with those of the major CSPs has become a major benefit to our customers.

Gain a competitive advantage

Ensuring that your infrastructure is optimized and up to date can give your business a competitive advantage in the marketplace. In general, Lightstream Cloud Managed Services customers are better positioned to achieve five business outcomes after undergoing a Well-Architected Review:

• Reduce costs
• Increase revenue
• Ensure compliance
• Go to market faster
• Increase the quality of products or services

Harnessing the speed and agility offered by the cloud is the first step. But with those advantages come risks such as misconfiguration, security threats and financial and operational inefficiencies. If you’re not proactive about avoiding these risks, you open your organization up to multiple vulnerabilities that cybercriminals and competitors are waiting to capitalize on.  Therefore, the question is not “can I afford to maintain a Well-Architected Framework?” but, “can I afford not to?”

To learn about how Lightstream Cloud Managed Services can help your enterprise identify and remediate security vulnerabilities, improve compliance, technically right-size applications and reduce your cloud spend, contact us today or visit http://lightstream.tech.