Over the past couple of years, we have seen companies adopting cloud-managed services for their business operations. The global Cloud Managed Services (CMS) market size is estimated to grow from USD 62.4 billion in 2020 to USD 116.2 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 13.3% during the forecast period, according to a study by Markets and Markets. Cloud managed services include security, DevOps, maintenance and support, cloud infrastructure and optimization, and many others. Implementation of these services helps enterprises save IT and operational costs and enhances their productivity.
Transferring to the cloud has enormous potential for companies in terms of lower costs, elasticity, and innovation, but at the same time, it brings new challenges for IT organizations. Managing a cloud environment is complex and places massive pressure on enterprise networks from security as well as a bandwidth point of view. Cloud platform services are launched with new updates and features on an almost weekly basis, which makes it difficult for IT organizations to leverage the latest, innovation-centric cloud services effectively. IT organizations must change the way they manage and support their businesses in a cloud-based landscape.
IT organizations need to reassess their processes to shift from traditional operations. They also need to develop a cloud-based operating model that supports multi-speed delivery across multi-cloud landscapes. If companies want to fully utilize the cloud’s innovation potential, they need to reassess how they run their cloud operations.
Critical Areas of Effective Cloud Management
Enterprises should rethink their cloud management approach and philosophy across five key areas.
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Cloud Managed Services
For effective cloud-managed services, your operating model should be able to handle the challenges of ever-evolving technologies. It should also provide agility, ease of use, and scalability and must handle traditional applications that want control of the estate, predictability of performance, and a stable environment. Your cloud operating model must support multi-cloud and multi-legacy environments while ensuring multi-speed delivery.
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Cloud Consumption Services
Companies need to rethink “how,” “when,” and “what” to buy from their cloud service providers and understand the complexities of the options offered across IaaS, PaaS, and enterprise support. In addition to understanding bills, your organization should be able to map credits back to the correct budget and projects.
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Cloud Optimization Services
Optimizing how applications and data employ the cloud platform is one of the critical challenges. For this purpose, cloud optimization services are essential to maximizing application performance while minimizing potential costs. Without the right modeling tools, methodologies to optimize, and knowledge of the latest innovations, IT organizations risk spending more than is necessary across their existing cloud estate.
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Cloud Security Management
Every cloud environment should have a core set of essential security functions. Based on data classification and regulatory requirements, the deployment of advanced security services should also be considered. The operating model and the cloud environment must adhere to regulatory and compliance requirements while augmenting security controls with cloud-native capabilities.
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Cloud Managed Platform
Organizations should no longer think in terms of tools that manage infrastructure but instead think in terms of a platform that administers a set of cloud operations components. As technology continues to evolve, and cloud innovation expands, this platform needs to advance over time as well. A cloud-managed platform should be able to operate across a complex, multi, and hybrid cloud estate. For cloud optimization, your cloud management platform must deliver on usage data, cloud tagging, monitoring of new services, and predictive analytics. Your cloud-managed needs to evolve, so it must be able to embed continuous innovation.
By rethinking your approach to cloud-managed services, optimization capabilities, and consumption management, you can see an improved business. It is imperative to reassess your cloud-managed services to ensure cost management while unleashing the full business potential of the cloud for enhanced flexibility and necessary innovation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, reassessing your cloud operations is essential in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. With the global Cloud Managed Services market projected to grow significantly, leveraging these services can reduce IT and operational costs while boosting productivity. However, the complexity of managing a cloud environment, coupled with frequent updates and new features, necessitates a shift in how IT organizations operate. By focusing on key areas such as cloud-managed services, consumption, optimization, security, and a managed platform, enterprises can maximize their cloud investments.