CloudOps blog

The use of DevOps is a hot topic at the moment and there are endless tutorials or tools which allow you to manage the process. This article isn't about that, it doesn't advocate for DevOps one way or the other, it is written to explain what DevOps actually is and remove the buzzwords. 

In recent years, sustainability has become a key focus for many organizations, as businesses strive to reduce their carbon footprint and meet their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. One area where sustainability has had a significant impact is in the world of cloud computing.

When properly managed and configured to the specific needs of your application or service, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS both offer substantial performance advantages over traditional server infrastructure.  Unfortunately, without the advice and support of a specialist, it’s unlikely that your organisation is fully benefiting from the flexibility, scale and improved reliability that’s available with a genuine and bespoke cloud deployment.

Understanding the componentry of Virtual Machines can at first appear quite complex due to the flexible nature and number of components.

The use of cloud infrastructure to replace legacy systems allows organisations to reduce the capital costs of buying IT hardware.  This migration process requires the virtual infrastructure to be specified in the same way as a physical data centre.  This specification process involves determining the processing power required to maximise application performance and designing a solution that delivers this using “virtual machines” or “VMs” in place of physical Servers.

With more and more organisations moving their applications and programmes to the cloud there is a growing need for managing the day to day growth and management of their infrastructure and resources. Companies want to ensure that they have a robust, scalable solution which will meet their objectives today and into the future because downtime can affect profitability and long term growth.

For many independent software vendors (ISVs) the need to move their applications to the cloud has been gathering pace for a number of years. The expectation that an application can be accessed by anyone, from anywhere, means that to compete with competitors a key requirement is to move to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model with applications available from the cloud.

The cloud brings numerous benefits to businesses who choose to migrate their application or data hosting to a virtualised environment.  However, the process of migrating to Azure or AWS can bring some challenges if proper planning is not undertaken.

As with any major IT project, moving a business critical application or data to the cloud carried some risk.

The cloud is now a mature and stable framework for migrating your IT infrastructure. Whilst its scalability provides many benefits, like any resource it needs to be properly managed to ensure you are fully in control of both usage and costs.