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How to help your clients optimize their cloud(s): Four best practices

 business continuity strategy best practices

By 2021, cloud data centers will process 94% of all workloads and compute instances — and your clients need to be ready.

Required: new ways of thinking

“Lift and shift” cloud migration is giving way to cloud optimization and its promise of realizing cloud computing’s deeper benefits — scale, flexibility, simplicity, and agility. This requires new ways of thinking about the data center , including…

  • SecOps — aligning security teams with operations teams.
  • Workload and workflow management — what should be migrated as cloud workloads change from productivity tasks to mission-critical activities — and what impact will this have on business workflow?
  • Multi-cloud strategies , such as multi-cloud disaster recovery and separating app development and production environments.
  • Agile application development , notably cloud-native and serverless applications (which eschew provisioned servers and/or execute application logic without storing data).
Four cloud optimization best practices
1 Help your clients hone a cloud optimization strategy

Without an overarching cloud optimization strategy, your clients risk losing control of…

  • Burgeoning cloud costs . A cloud optimization strategy is essential to your clients’ ability to establish and monitor cloud ROI metrics.
  • Optimizing cloud(s) as use scales up . This involves decisions about integration, workload migration, and what applications should be made cloud-native and/or serverless.
2 Help your clients put security first

How much shadow IT — those cloud services procured by business units without input from IT staff — lurks in your clients’ enterprises? Shadow IT is shadow security risk. As your clients’ use of cloud(s) matures and they go about optimizing cloud resources, they’ll put the business at risk right now if they don’t put security first .

3 Help your clients anticipate

Mobility technologies, the Internet of Things, and big data analytics are poised to change how your clients do business. Unless they have deep cloud skills, they’ll require help determining what to migrate, what to integrate, what to make cloud-native and/or serverless, how to modify workflows, and which multi-cloud models best suit their business.

To ensure your clients can navigate smoothly from the present to the future, introduce them to an experienced, vendor-neutral cloud provider/technology consultant able to partner with you in helping them assess their current IT environment alongside their business goals.

4 Help your clients choose the right cloud providers

How many cloud providers do your clients tend to use? Help them make sure each provider delivers all the capabilities necessary in an enterprise IT environment, including the ability to:

  • Flexibly scale required cloud resources at levels of availability, reliability, and security that meet or exceed customers’ performance needs and risk tolerance;
  • Monitor, manage, and orchestrate workloads from a single console across the entire environment;
  • Integrate cloud solutions with managed services and customers’ on-premises systems ;
  • Provide application development and testing services to help generate cloud-native apps;
  • Customize all services ;
  • Offer transparency in pricing and service levels, including customizable service level agreements;
  • Ensure high service quality and responsive customer support ; and
  • Partner with customers in long-term relationships .
Meet the Author
Adam Burke is Quest's Vice President of Sales and Partnerships.
Contact Quest Today  ˄
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