You know your business will need to start relying on cloud services to continue growing, but you also know that improper cloud configurations from the start can cripple your organization’s security, impede your employees’ access and generally reduce the effectiveness of your cloud environments for years to come. Fortunately, because you are aware of the importance of setting up your cloud infrastructure correctly, you can take the best steps to building your cloud to your business’s exact needs — now and into the future.
Visualize the Big Picture
Creating a cloud infrastructure can quickly become overwhelming, as there are many details your business needs to juggle to get the system just right. Before you get bogged down in minutia, you should make a concerted effort to soar above the project to get a bird’s eye view. Visualizing the Big Picture can help you develop a more comprehensive plan that keeps your business’s goals at top of mind. When you are appropriately focused on the result, your cloud-building project should go faster, smoother and overall better.
Find Your Foundation
A foundation is critical for any project, whether that project is a house, a painting or a cloud infrastructure. When it comes to the latter, the foundation you are looking for is the technology platform where you will build and maintain your cloud into the future. In some cases, businesses may already have a relationship with a cloud developer with whom they manage all of their cloud virtualization, but if your business is new to the cloud, you should shop around for the provider that can suit all of your unique needs.
Configure Your Delivery
Your delivery infrastructure will impact what resources your cloud needs as well as what it can be capable of, so it is important to make decisions regarding your delivery infrastructure with care. It is typical that you will design your cloud delivery using a load balancer, which allocates resources appropriately. For as long as you utilize your cloud infrastructure, system administrators will interface with the load balancer to manage the system’s performance. Thus, this could be a crucial step in the design and development of your cloud.
Work With Security Experts
The cloud can be dramatically more secure than other methods of storing data or running applications, but only if it is carefully designed to eliminate vulnerabilities. You might consider working with security experts in your cloud development process to ensure that you are not misconfiguring important components, using faulty APIs or otherwise compromising your cloud in glaringly obvious ways. This is of particular importance if you are operating in an industry that is heavily regulated or utilizing exceedingly sensitive information within your infrastructure.
Adapt Your Network
When you have completed your cloud infrastructure — or are coming close to completing it — you still have a good amount of work ahead of you in the form of preparing your business network to function effectively and securely with your cloud system. You will likely need to reconfigure your network, changing certain elements regarding network resources to suit the format of your cloud. In its early stages of launch, system administrators will need to carefully monitor the network and make updates to ensure that both the cloud and the rest of the network can accommodate changes to resource allocation and traffic.
Take Advantage of Automation
Cloud environments can shift quickly, requiring a rapid response to keep data and applications available and operating as intended. While system administrators and their teams can and should be on call to make changes as necessary, it is far more economical for you to utilize an automation platform to monitor and manage cloud resources without intervention. Sophisticated AI solutions can be trusted with day-to-day maintenance, which helps to free up IT teams to focus on more pressing tasks, like the development of new cloud infrastructures.
Whether this is the first cloud infrastructure you have created or the fifteenth, you need to take the right steps in the right order to ensure that your cloud solution is safe and successful. Your business will benefit from a better cloud infrastructure, so you should take the time to get everything right.
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