After the Lift and Shift: 10 Steps to Optimize Your Cloud Efficiency

The majority of enterprises and companies move into the cloud to leverage performance optimization and efficiently handle their workloads. Although cloud infrastructure proves to be efficient for most of the companies, there is always some room to further optimize your cloud efficiency by making minor improvement changes to your infrastructure.

If you have just migrated your applications and workload into the cloud, then it’s time to optimize your cloud infrastructure by using our ten most performance-oriented steps below:

1. Data Control 

Control over your stored data is a major concern for scaling companies. It’s important to create data governance policies to keep control over all data. Data governance laws vary from location to location. So, companies have to abide by their country’s data regulation laws.

Many cloud providers use data duplication to keep files secure by copying and scattering it over multiple data servers. Data duplication can raise multiple concerns over your company’s sensitive information. Therefore, you can take control of your data by increasing the granular access policies through your cloud provider.

Moreover, it is equally important to control data coming from varied sources by optimizing cloud storage. Create multiple data-tiers to store relevant data in its respective tier. It is also advisable to efficiently distribute workloads for improved data recovery to take complete control over your data.

2. Performance Improvements

There are multiple ways to enhance cloud performance based on your current workload and your preferred cloud provider. AWS provides a range of tools to improve performance under certain circumstances. For example, the platform offers EC2 Spot Instances for minimizing costs while keeping cloud performance intact.

AWS leads the market in how it keeps launching new features and services with notable changes in performance. Keep an eye on these features and services to make best use for cloud optimization. In addition, a great Cloud MSP can potentially reduce your costs while maximizing the performance. 

3. Optimize Infrastructure

Reduce unnecessary workloads from your infrastructures to enhance performance. Optimized infrastructure demands a good cloud-data management strategy to efficiently handle all the required resources so it’s an excellent idea to put a plan into effect.

New cloud environments tend to be more performance efficient in comparison to legacy architecture. So, consider shifting your workload to better and improved infrastructure to significantly increase performance. 

It is essential to analyze numerous applications and fine-tune how resources are distributed among your environments according to their requirements. This will minimize any waste of resources while improving the overall performance of infrastructure.

4. Compute Storage & Network Management

All cloud-hosted companies should compute their cloud storage requirements before storing their workload. It is important to effectively shift workload between flash and spinning disk. Also, consider distributing computing resources based on workloads and applications.

When it comes to efficient network management in the cloud, Software-defined networking (SDN) is probably the most dynamic and reliable network management configuration that allows monitoring and improving network performance in a cloud environment.

5. Improve the End-User Experience

Many companies migrate onto cloud with a primary goal to provide fast user-experience to the application users. However as well as speed it’s important to ensure that user-experience is consistent for everyone across the globe. 

Also, use content optimization techniques including caching to reduce bandwidth demand without impacting the end-user experience. You can fill performance and experience gaps by consistently monitoring applications to overcome any performance constraints. 

6. Data Analytics 

Cloud providers offer various data analytics tools to extract and monitor raw data inside a cloud infrastructure to come up with useful information to make cloud improvements. For instance, AWS offers Big Data Analytics solutions to their users to filter out actionable information.

Some other tools like  Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics are also useful to gain business and customer insights to make enhancements in your cloud infrastructure for better performance and user-experience. Data analytics is a major cornerstone that has the potential to analyze and improve cloud efficiency in targeted areas.

7. Monitor Computing Power

Enterprises and companies often end up purchasing too much computing power for their workload and applications. The majority of this computing power remains unused, and it goes to waste. This issue is pretty common among cloud users, and it is called over-provisioning.

Converged Infrastructures are often cost-effective with power management capabilities. Monitoring your power usage is another effective way to reduce unnecessary costs by downgrading to your used resources. 

A lot of cloud providers tend to scale computing power correspondingly with your increasing requirements. However, you still need to monitor your computing resources for reducing costs and improving efficiency.

8. Establish Better Security Practices

A critical step in cloud efficiency is implementing best security practices, ensuring security of your applications and data. Start by separating and encrypting sensitive data from regulated data and uncovering any malicious user behaviors.

There is a lot more to cloud security, such as protecting your cloud with suitable data protection policies, encryption of sensitive data, data sharing policies, malware protection tools and removing any malicious malware from the infrastructure. All these practices can collectively improve your cloud efficiency.

9. Invest in Virtualization

Another efficiency technique is to use virtualization to create various simulated environments. Each environment has distributed resources from a single cloud infrastructure. It allows the creation of a virtual ecosystem of storage devices and various server operating systems.

Cloud virtualization can significantly improve workload management as compared to traditional computing methods. Therefore, it is a more efficient and scalable way to optimize your cloud environment. 

10. Cloud Orchestration & Automation

The goal of cloud orchestration is to automate tasks that are required to manage connections and operations between private and public clouds. It helps to integrate automated tasks in a particular way to improve business functions.

Cloud providers offer a range of automation tools to automate repetitive tasks that need manual effort. These manual tasks might be associated with provisioning, configuration, and managing public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

Bottom Line

Cloud migration is not the end of application or workload optimization, it is just a new beginning that carries a lot of further potential to improve your applications. If you implement these important steps, then you can increase the overall efficiency of your cloud infrastructure by implementing the right set of tools, processes, and methods.

Caylent provides a critical DevOps-as-a-Service function to high growth companies looking for expert support with Kubernetes, cloud security, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines. Our managed and consulting services are a more cost-effective option than hiring in-house, and we scale as your team and company grow. Check out some of the use cases, learn how we work with clients, and read more about our DevOps-as-a-Service offering.