After the recent WannaCry cyber event that rocked the National Health Service and thousands of companies worldwide, the thought of any additional threats to the way we use technology in our organisations is both frustrating and deeply concerning.

So, mention the term ‘cloud sprawl’ as another fear looming over the enterprise sector and you might think it’s all become too difficult to stay on top of.

In fact, however, cloud sprawl is not as intimidating as the name sounds – it simply refers to businesses inefficiently controlling their cloud use to the point that it costs them in terms of both resources and finances.

However, despite the differences, the WannaCry breach has taught us something that can be applied to cloud sprawl too – for in the case of WannaCry successful management of technology mitigated the threat, as those who had updated their Microsoft security patches were unaffected by the breach.

Similarly, cloud sprawl, while sounding like another IT disaster is something that we can actually control and mitigate with simple, appropriate management.

So just what is cloud sprawl?

According to a Technopedia definition, cloud sprawl is “uncontrolled proliferation” of a business’s cloud presence. What this basically means is that an organisation has various cloud instances that it is not managing effectively – one or more instances, for example, may be forgotten and therefore use up resources unnecessarily, leading to further costs as most organisations pay for cloud services.

In short, it’s much like server sprawl or even VM sprawl. For example, a developer might test one portion of a system being developed in AWS and then forget to delete it while moving on to an entirely new instance – leaving the previous one running.

Without suitable management, this can quickly get out of hand especially given the plethora of applications that exist in a typical enterprise today coupled with the rapid rate at which we’re generating data.

With energy and hosting expenses rising, the costs can quickly spiral – so even though cloud sprawl is something that can be managed simply, it’s also something to take very seriously.

How do you manage cloud sprawl?

Taking control of cloud sprawl should be seen as essential for any business and should be implemented in a manner that makes it a consistent part of ongoing IT practices.

While each organisation may have differences in their approach based on the cloud instances they are using, here is a short checklist that can be used to help you develop an appropriate strategy.

Define the issue clearly

Make sure that the concept of cloud sprawl is communicated clearly throughout the organisation. By understanding the issue, your IT staff will become more aware of their individual practices and help reduce issues ahead of time. However, you’ll also need to set out appropriate expectations and a routine that they should follow.

Think architecturally

Implementing a plan that asks an IT department to manually manage tedious tasks is far from cost effective. Instead, consider a more architectural approach through workload automation which will allow your resources to run based on a strict schedule that you have determined based on your internal needs and historic use. This can help maximise by efficiently dealing with time-consuming daily tasks through notifications and alerts.

Periodical audits

Regular ‘health checks’ should be carried out on your cloud services. Make sure you plan periodical internal audits that take into account all aspects of the cloud service – including applications, platform virtualisation and all of its infrastructure components.

This will also give you the opportunity to assess how well the cloud is working for your business at that particular point in time – as your business develops, has the cloud developed with it? Or are there areas of its functionality that are not adequate for your developing needs?

Transparency is key

Without making services transparent to end users there could be a serious impact on their perception. As such you should look to set up good industry practices around request fulfilment and service cataloguing as well as capacity management. Integrate those into your cloud management processes for business users and the service should run more efficiently and effectively.

Implement a dashboard

A dashboard can be a great way to monitor the performance of a service – and cloud services are no exception. An effective dashboard that shows all aspects of cloud services in a single view will allow you to quickly identify any areas that need improving and steer the business away from added costs by helping you to make decisions in a faster manner.

There are paid-for services emerging that are designed to help businesses address cloud sprawl – and indeed taking expert advice is often advisable. However, by following the steps outlined and preparing a comprehensive plan to control the proliferation of your computer resources, you have the potential to optimise the performance of your cloud services and ensure they always work effectively for your business.

It only makes sense that creating best practices and cost-effective systems increases the likelihood of business success. So why not apply this same thought process to Cloud deployment?

Why is optimising Cloud deployments so important?

Have you noticed increased reliance on the Cloud as part of your business? If so, then you’re certainly not alone – 2017 has very much been the year in which the Cloud has exploded and the key players within the market are all attempting to grab more business.

In turn, organisations are seeing cloud deployments as the default environment for new systems and migrations from existing on-premise or co-located systems. Furthermore, some organisations are also moving development activities to the cloud.

So, isn’t this a good thing?

Of course, the increased emphasis on the Cloud is generally positive for businesses – but it can create inefficiencies too. That’s because, in most cases, the switch to the Cloud has been quite organic and businesses have been carrying out cloud deployments without sufficient awareness of building solutions in a cloud environment, disaster recovery, scale, high availability and cost management. The net result is that organisations do not receive maximum benefit from the cloud.

While the pros of utilising the Cloud may generally outweigh those of a more traditional deployment, the perception of these advantages can be held back if a Cloud is seen as more time consuming, more expensive or, in worst case scenarios, if the inefficiencies it causes actually harm the user experience and ultimately your reputation

Are there best practices you can follow with Cloud deployment?

There are many best practices you can employ with the Cloud that will enhance overall deployment. These include:

Capacity

One of the major advantages of the Cloud is that you can easily scale your system up and down to minimise cost. Don’t sit on idle resources that add unnecessary expense.

Test production

The Cloud provides a platform on which you have a production-scale environment for testing – so use it. It will mean you’re simulating the live environment for just a fraction of the cost as you can easily turn off test systems when not in use.

Automate

With the Cloud, you should look to make the most of automation, allowing you to replicate architectures for considerably less cost and effort. It will also allow you to track changes while auditing and assessing their impact.

Track data

The Cloud allows you to track data so you can make decisions based around it. Over time, utilising that data can lead to further efficiencies and improve your choices.

How do you go about further optimising Cloud deployment?

There are five broad areas in which Cloud deployment can be optimised, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS) – those being: security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation and operational excellence. However, there isn’t simply a “one size fits all”, fool-proof approach to maximising these areas – instead it’s about making trade-offs to suit the context of your business – for example, when developing you might wish to maximise cost efficiencies at the expense of reliability, but when providing an e-commerce solution, performance is likely to be the key driver because it is so important to customers and their buying decisions.

However, there isn’t simply a “one size fits all”, fool-proof approach to maximising these areas – instead it’s about making trade-offs to suit the context of your business – for example, when developing you might wish to maximise cost efficiencies at the expense of reliability, but when providing an e-commerce solution, performance is likely to be the key driver because it is so important to customers and their buying decisions.

Here is a summary of each area:

Security

It’s vital to control who can do what before putting practices into place. You’ll need to be able to quickly identify any security issues, while also having clear processes in place to respond to any incidents that do occur to limit financial loss. Therefore, you should be looking for a mix of detective controls, data and infrastructure protection, and incident response.

Reliability

How quickly can the system recover from a disruption and mitigate it? This will be vital to the perception of your business and there are several principles that can boost reliability, including: clear test recovery procedures, setting up triggered automated recovery when thresholds are breached; and closely managing any changes.

Performance Efficiency

Can you maintain efficiency as demand evolves? The Cloud opens up this possibility because instead of having an IT team learn many new principles it can provide new technologies such as machine learning, NoSQL databases and media transcoding as part of a service, clearing your team to focus on product development.

The Cloud also offers advantages in terms of the ability to globalise your systems, run server-less architectures and experiment quickly. To enjoy these the Cloud also offers advantages in terms of the ability to globalise your systems, run server-less architectures and experiment quickly.

To enjoy these advantages however, you’ll need to appropriately select a system, monitor it and make the necessary trade-offs – such as space versus time, to enjoy higher performance.

Cost Optimisation

Remember this is about the lifecycle of the system and continuous refinement. The Cloud allows you to stop spending on data centres and to pay only based on consumption – but you need to optimise this by being aware of your expenditure, choosing cost-effective resources and matching supply with demand.

Operational Excellence

The Cloud can drive operations by performing them with code, allowing you to make minor changes, respond quickly to unexpected events and, most importantly, align processes with your business goals. However, for this to be maximised you’ll need to design workflows thoroughly, evolve them over time and ensure your team is able to quickly respond to failures and learn from them.

 

This is, of course, just an overview of why optimising cloud deployment is vital – to implement these strategies consider turning to Arrk’s consultants who can review your business individually to help you implement a cloud optimsation strategy that works for you.

‘Hey, someone, somewhere mentioned AWS S3 had an outage?’ It is the last day of February over at the Amazon Simple Storage Service team and a team member accidently executed a command which knocked out several important servers which lead to the S3 outage.  We would have missed this event, if it hadn’t been for the mass hysteria in the media!

It isn’t the first service issue that AWS has had, and it is not alone. All Cloud service providers experience outages, whether that’s AWS, Google, Azure, Force.com or any other organisation in the sector. It is a fact that if something can fail then at some point it will. With the recent S3 issue there were two types of AWS customers, those who had their own service outages as a result and those who didn’t. (If you’re interested in reading more about February/March problem head over to AWS’s statement on the outage.)

The difference between these two types of AWS customer?

Simply put the reason for these two very different outcomes is down to the individual organisations’ application architecture. Those AWS customers that design single points of failure into services were impacted and furthermore they knew they would be affected, as AWS has never claimed 100 per cent service availability and officially advises customers to architect accordingly. When you build Cloud solutions you have to accept shared responsibility for risk.

In the February’17 S3 incident, the issue was with a single AWS region. Those customers who were impacted had obviously made the business decision that the risk of an outage at AWS was acceptable when compared to the cost of architecting their application to work across regions, across Cloud vendors or using an alternative such as Google App Engine.

The knock on effect to SaaS Vendors

The AWS incident wasn’t restricted to just those AWS customers that had a single point of failure either, there were a number of SaaS vendors whose platforms had varying degrees of issues, the knock on being that their customers were also dragged into the incident.

For these SaaS vendor customers, there is no easy of knowing if their chosen SaaS vendor will or won’t have these issues due to Cloud outages. However, the devil is in the detail and a delve into a Saas vendor’s terms of service will reveal that they, just like their cloud provider, won’t offer a 100 per cent service guarantee. Therefore customers of SaaS vendors also have to assume that they will suffer from unplanned outages and therefore plan accordingly. In this particularly large S3 incident, problems were compounded for some SaaS customers as they were relying on those solutions to deal with the initial AWS issue.

Lessons to learn from the AWS S3 outage incident

Outages like the one experienced by AWS should not be seen as a reason to dismiss the Cloud, as the positives generally outweigh the negatives, but it does mean that careful and consider appreciation is needed when utilising it.

• Make sure you understand the implications of your design decisions and have assessed the business risks of those decisions.
• Make sure you understand the concept of shared responsibility and that you architect your services in-line with your risk decisions.
• Make sure you understand the implications of choosing a specific Cloud vendor.

The Cloud is your friend but utilise it correctly

If you are planning to build new or migrate existing services to the Cloud, then take some time to understand and assess the risk. It is vital to have an appreciation of how your services will be deployed on the Cloud and what that means for your organisation, then architect your solution appropriately.

If you already have your services deployed on the Cloud, then make sure you have completed the risk assessment and that your current solution meets your needs. If that hasn’t happened then give it a top priority. If your organisation has changed significantly since you deployed services to the Cloud then re-assess the risks to your organisation and make plans accordingly.

If you have completed your assessment and found that your current solution doesn’t meet your needs then as a matter of urgency you need to look at what can be done to improve your deployment. This may mean that you need to re-architect and refactor elements of your service. Use this as an opportunity to make sure that your services are fully Cloud native.

In addition to thinking about service availability, look at how you are using the elastic nature of cloud computing. If one aspect of your application architecture is compromised there may be other aspects as well that can be improved. A sub-optimal Cloud architecture will result in poor service availability and higher than necessary operating costs.