Well, to be honest, that’s not at all surprising. It’s an all too common scenario.
Why?
Because companies choose to use Cloud Services for the following reasons.
1. To urgently replace an existing backup solution.
2. Because some new urgent project demands a Cloud based solution.
3. To speedily boost or replace on premise servers.
All of these are time based demands and often they spawn a sudden launch into Cloud without serious consideration of how resources should be managed.
The common problems this creates include:
No tagging
No one knows why a server was built or if it can be deleted
Lack of clear ownership
Bills cannot be allocated properly
Disagreement as to who owns the shared Cloud services
Insecure solutions
Inefficient solutions
Inflexible designs
Insperitas can help you by:
Evaluating your whole Cloud infrastructure Ensuring proper systems and processes to enforce best practices (read more…) Remediation of existing issues
But you don’t want or need to become dependent on Insperitas. And you probably wont be able to move immediately to meet best practices. A better solution might be for a consultant can come to your site (or work remotely) for 1 day a week to teach and guide your own employees to implement success.
Together let’s bring your costs back down to earth.
Call me (+44 7932 678578) or fill in your details on our contact page and start moving towards a more cost effective Cloud engagement.
I have been delivering business cards to local businesses offering Cloud IT Services. Often the unspoken question is
“Are you asking me for money?’
Followed quickly by:
“Can you save me money?’
Of course the answer is: It depends! I would like to shout out “YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT” but that’s probably not helpful. Instead I decided to write this blog “Saving Money with The Cloud”.
Most businesses I speak to face many pressures and the last thing on their mind is IT. They are concerned about getting new business, managing staff, their premises costs, managing their current workload effectively… the list goes on.
So here are FIVE reasons to think about your business and Cloud IT Solutions.
Continuity
Taking the most obvious reasons for spending on IT first, we need to talk about failure. What happens when it all goes wrong? You have data saved on your laptop or a local server and it breaks. Do you have a backup? Do you know how to access your backup? Will you be reliant on someone visiting your business to fix the problem? What will that cost?
We can level this up too… what happens when the company you rely on to supply your backup solution fails to deliver? Do you want to wait until there is a disaster to find out if your solution is effective? Most companies seem to be happy to operate with this head in the sand approach. The truth is that backing up to Cloud is likely to be either a necessary extra expense (if you have no valuable backup solution today) or a cost saving (if your current backup solution is anywhere other than in The Cloud). So the answer here is “Yes I can save you money.”
Growth
If you need to expand for any reason you should think Cloud. If you take on staff how will you communicate and share data? Do you need more space for more data? The Cloud might be the cheapest option and will remove your need to spend cash on new hardware.
Money Management
Maybe this should be the number 1 reason to move to Cloud? With Cloud Services you pay for what you use. Its easy to budget. There are no unexpected bills. Any Cloud support costs should be 100% transparent with no surprises.
Security
The next thing we need to discuss is “Security”. IT Security is such a massive topic, whole books are written about it and anything I write here could only gloss over one of the most important IT topics. Suffice it to say that lots of small companies imagine that this is not an issue for them. Until you ask them what their competitors could do with their customer list… or what they could do with their competitors list of contacts. Security IS an issue for EVERYONE.
Some imagine that the least secure place for their data is on the cloud but I suggest you look at it this way: If I were to post your data where everyone can see it, such as on a billboard, what would we need to do with that data to keep it secure. Then answer is to encrypt it. Secrecy has come a long way since you were a child. We don’t just swap the letters around or write it in lemon juice. Very complex encryption techniques are available to all of us. By utilizing this technology we can choose precisely who should see what data whilst making it available easily.
We don’t just swap the letters around
or write it in lemon juice.
Improving your business
For some companies there is a clear benefit in improving their IT. Yes you can save money by introducing efficiency to your business. Good IT choices can drive better business decisions. Even very small businesses should be tech-aware. Whether its digital marketing, a better website or sharing data with customers YOU can improve your business by making good IT choices.
For larger customers, adopting Cloud best practices can make you reach your market faster, change quicker and allow you to become more agile. Business growth is often driven by disrupting the status quo. Will you be disrupting or disrupted?
Data breaches occur all too often. Tighter controls are imminent and will help protect Personally Identifiable Information. However, every person or business that posts or stores anything on a Cloud Platform MUST take full responsibility for that data. This includes understanding the security of the Cloud Service.
This blog is NOT a full and complete list of all security measures that could be implemented but I would like to highlight some of the measures that should be considered.
Risk Awareness
We all have data that is pretty much of very little value to anyone else. That picture of your new born baby might have massive sentimental value to you but is probably not going to be worth much in the hands of a criminal. We also have data that we intend to be publicly available: Your CV, for example, or a company’s marketing brochure.
Some data that will be stored in the Cloud could cripple or destroy a business if it were to be compromised. Every piece of data has a value to you and a value to others. The costs of securing data should be carefully weighed against those values.
Your CSP
Whilst a very large company investing millions in a Cloud Service might well want to spend money determining how secure a CSP’s datacentres are, for the most of us that is overkill. Cloud Service Provider’s (CSP’s) base their business case on providing a secure solution. For the most part, we can safely assume that data stored with a major player in the Cloud will be significantly more secure than storing it ourselves. (Yes, even if you keep it under your pillow … or your dog’s pillow)
They will however expect you to do your part!
ENCRYPTION
Hopefully an obvious one but if you don’t intend your data to be publicly available then you should definitely encrypt it! However you have a number of options.
Encrypt on premise and manage your own keys.
Encrypt in transit using your own or a CSP managed key.
Encrypt at rest using your own or a CSP managed key.
For the vast majority of us, trusting the keys provided by the CSP will be sufficient. If you are storing government secrets you may wish to manage your own keys.
Account Security
From when your account is first set up you should be sure that your access to your account cannot be compromised. If you allow someone else access to your account everything else becomes irrelevant. In many companies though access needs to be shared. There are a number of tools we can use such as Multi-Factor Authentication that we can utilize to help us implement Least Privilege Access.
Least Privilege Access
It is essential that any Cloud Strategy simplifies the process for devolving access and responsibility for data. Practices that have been important in traditional computing environments for many years are even more crucial as we move to the Cloud. This includes appointing a data owner for every bit of data and managing the full life cycle of that data. Least privilege, as the name suggests, means that we only give the minimum amount of access to data that a person needs to accomplish the specific task in hand. Some CSPs allow a person (an identity) to assume a number of roles which allow differing levels of access.
Firewall Controls
All major CSPs offer a competent firewall service that can be trusted. This should be utilized to implement Least Privileged Access to the public. This would indicate that where a service has a public front end, the data behind that service is held in a place that is fire-walled off from the front end.
CI / CD
The perfect security solution lies in making security part of your release process. The most forward thinking companies have a process of Continual Improvement and Continuous Deployment. One of my favourite lines is that Etsy ask their new programmers to deploy to live on day one. It is possible to completely automate the processes that secure our data and our infrastructure in the Cloud. This is complex but will be valuable when done well. One day all code will be released this way (I hope 😉 )
Your might be considering Cloud for any of the following reasons:
You Need Cheap Secure Offsite Backup. The Cloud can be an effective way to achieve this.
Your Server Hardware is Old. You have some applications running on a server that is aging and ought to be replaced. If “Cash is King” then saving the capital expense might be useful.
You’d Like to Reduce Your IT Costs. Sometimes a service that is currently provided in house such as email can be delivered more effectively (and possibly cheaper) by a Cloud Service Provider (CSP).
Whatever your drivers are, it is essential that you resolve the following important issues!
Choosing the CSP. There are a number of providers. Which one(s) are a good fit for your business?
Account set up. The last thing you need is to set up the account in a way that will leave you frustrated later.
Cost Management. You need to be certain that costs cannot escalate horribly because of a poor design.
Security is essential. How can you be 100% sure that your data (and your customer’s) data is secure?
This blog expands on the topics above. I would be delighted to assist you with investigating and providing solutions for any of these. Insperitas is also able to provide support for Cloud solutions.
Choosing The CSP.
The three largest providers are also the most flexible
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest CSP on the planet and offers a very wide range of services. The tools are relatively well known and can be adapted easily. For many this is the go-to place when beginning a Cloud Journey. https://aws.amazon.com/choosing-a-cloud-platform/
Microsoft are good at providing a Cloud version of services that they would traditionally provide by selling applications. Email is a classic example. For larger companies MS also offer a mature Identity and Access Management Solution based on Active Directory. Microsoft have a large network of partners and are “Enterprise Ready” in the sense that they are the oldest and most mature of the Big 3 CSPs.
Google are slightly newer to providing Cloud Services when compared to AWS. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a much smaller array of services than AWS. However the services which they do provide are very well executed. They have a stated aim to be the largest CSP in the world in the next few years. https://cloud.google.com/why-google/
Setting up the account
The important things to ensure when it comes to setting up your account in either AWS or in GCP are:
Dont get locked out! You need MFA but who will have ultimate control?
For AWS choose a good Phone number.
For Google, will you get an enterprise account or a Gmail account?
How can you give access to another account for support?
If you have teenagers in your house you will well understand the difference in attitude to electricity use between bill-payers and non-bill-payers (also known as freeloaders). When you are using your own hosted infrastructure you only have to make sure that you don’t fill up the hard drive or place too many demands on memory and processor. However when you use Cloud Services you need to be sure from day one that you will be warned if your monthly costs are going above your anticipated levels.
In addition you need to be sure that your costs are allocated correctly. This isn’t difficult but demands that you follow good Cloud practices right from the start.
Security
When I setup one of my first Cloud servers I was a little surprised to find out a week later that a virus had been installed on the server. I had left open a port to the server that could have been disastrous. These days whenever I build any service online I start with ensuring that it is secure. This isn’t complicated but it is necessary.
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Design your services and components to cope with failure. Any single component failure should not impact the overall service.
When designing Cloud Solutions ensure that the load is spread in a way that will cater for failure. The extent of the spread will depend on the criticality of the service as more spread equates to higher cost.
Use Load Balancers effectively to separate stateless micro-services from each other.
Instead of a monolithic approach, build a number of smaller applications that can call each other as necessary via APIs. Automated scaling allows you to keep costs down whilst ensuring demand is met.
Cloud technologies depend on good elasticity to be competitive. It’s easier to see which parts of your application are the most resource hungry (or the most utilized) and improves troubleshooting.
Building with micro-services is good practice is generally thought to be good practice. It allows improvement of individual services which adds agility.
Go Serverless where possible as this puts the onus on the CSP to provide the automated scalability.
With fully Automated scaling, horizontal scaling occurs in response to your Alerts.
NB. Applications divided into micro-services need to be stateless!
In order to ensure that costs are kept to a minimum it should be possible at all times to know all there is to know about each service. Its important to realize that when using elastic virtual servers, the logs could be deleted when the server is deleted. Therefore servers should log all data centrally in a way that can be readily interrogated.
Log everything. Modern Cloud Services provide detailed logs. Collect them ALL. These include Application Logs, Infrastructure Logs and Security Logs!
Good elasticity depends on having accurate usage data.
Failing to measure is a sure fire way to waste money.
Set alerts on services based on the metrics expected and your design.
Use Tags properly. Your 1st tag for each item should be Cost_Centre. Tagging Taxonomy is important to save future headaches.
A good logging tool is essential for intelligent interpretation.
All Cloud services worthy of the name can be used or accessed using their API. By calling this API via code we can benefit from:
Faster Deployments. Deploying both the application and the infrastructure using code can dramatically speed up deployment and lead to Continuous Deployment
Reduce Error. Version controlled, repeatable scripts remove opportunities for human error. Auditing, which is essential to many companies success, is also made much easier.
Automatic Configuration. We can use script based tools such as Ansible to control and configure our whole Cloud environment.
