Security risks for these multi-cloud
deployments are better managed
when organizations establish a
consistent set of best practices and
security controls across providers.
ongoing commitment to combating unchecked
spend, hyper growth, and siloes. One focus group
participant, in addition to relying on internal bench-
marking initiatives, went so far as to bring in an out-
side firm to review their processes: “It was a 6 month
study to see where we could make improvements.
There might not be a miracle approach but there’s a
lot of tweaks for better efficiency.”
3
Think Beyond Cost
Cost was a recurring theme throughout survey
responses and focus group discussions. However,
performance, utilization, and security also factored
in (to name just a few).
To maximize your investment you must be able to
understand spend by business group, allocate and
forecast monthly spend, amortize cost for account-
ability (including assets, services, and service items),
etc. Evaluating and optimizing resource utilization
and efficiency is also necessary in order to maximize
ROI. Performing analysis based on individual busi-
ness groups like product lines, workloads or cost cen-
ters will allow you to focus on opportunities that
offer the largest savings.
4
Centralize Governance
Managing large-scale cloud environments takes dis-
cipline, time and expertise. Rarely are all three found
in abundance.
“Like all machines with complicated moving parts,
when you have too many cooks in the proverbial
kitchen, things aren’t always as effective as you’d like,”
said a service admin in the technology industry. A
sound governance strategy eases the resource bur-
den by allowing you to set and automate policies that
simplify operations and speed decision making. Cen-
tralized governance with decentralized management
is key to an optimized cloud, and an agile business
environment.
5
Automate, Automate, Automate
Time and again, the laggards showed that their pro-
cesses were overwhelmingly manual. Automation
and governance go hand in hand: implementing poli-
cies, automating infrastructure schedules, rightsiz-
ing workloads, and managing reservations can sim-
plify day-to-day management, ensure the optimal
operation of cloud infrastructure, reduce manual
labor, and eliminate the potential for human error in
critical business operations.
SPRING 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 81