Vacations are over, school is about to start, and people are starting to think about what to do in the four months until the end of the year. In IT, that means driving success in the cloud.
Many IT manages have been incentivized with impending deadlines for shutting down enterprise data centers, migrating applications, and converting data from the enterprise to the cloud data conversion projects. It’s all a bit overwhelming. But there are two things you must do before 2017 is over.
1. Think security—yes, again
When considering the public cloud, security should be systemic to everything you do. This includes when encryption, key management, and the use of identities. However, most enterprises moving to cloud have no real definition of their security strategy, not to mention policies or the selection of enabling technology.
All is not lost. You can develop a strong security plan and lay out its implementation details between now and December. Be sure to include workload requirements and consider industry compliance (such as around personal information) and the impact on performance, devops, and other areas of the business that security may touch.
2. Consider the costs—and cost governance
Another short project that only takes a few weeks or a few months is to get cloud costs under management and ongoing control. Although you may believe that working out the best deal with Amazon Web Services or Google is all cost governance entails, provider price negotiations are actually just the beginning.
Cost governance must be in place to deal with the dynamic nature of how public clouds bill you for services, as well as to deal with the dynamic way that cloud services are consumed.
You’ll quickly end up with a huge cloud bill if you don’t track the usage and billing in real time, including placing limits on who can use what service, and when. You should automate all of this with a cloud cost governance tool.
These two efforts are typically low-risk, high-reward. You can easily complete them before the end of the year. So get on them!