Cloud Optimization

Advantages of Cloud Optimization

Optimizing your Cloud adds new capabilities to your business and avenues to increase the ROI in a number of ways:

• Proactive Scaling and Scheduling

  Resources on the cloud can scale along with the business by bringing the idle time of the resources to a minimum.

• Right-Sizing

  The correct size of the cloud can be determined at the current operational level of the business to ensure that over investments are avoided.

• Assessment of Features

  Cloud-dependent features of products/services can be assessed for misalignments that might be adding to overutilization of resources, thus adding to the costs.

• Monitoring

  Both existing and overhauled cloud systems can be monitored for performance appraisals and opportunities for further optimization can be recognized.

• Data-Driven Decision Making/Governance

  Data heads about the functioning of Cloud resources can be gathered to provide a bird’s eye view of the process for effective decision-making.

• Cost Control

  All these checks collaborate together to save businesses a lot of running and management costs related to the cloud.

The Four Phase Cloud Optimization Process at Cuelogic

Owing to years of experience across various industries that we have been exposed to over the years, a 4 phase process has been developed at Cuelogic that brings high efficiency and optimization opportunities on the table.

1. Identification

   We begin by identifying the gaps in your current storage infrastructure by pinpointing instances of chaos, like lack of sufficient visibility and controls. Such operational chaos can be inflicted due to multiple reasons, like unplanned growth, lack of the right supporting tools, decentralized organizational adoption of cloud resources, and limited in-house expertise regarding cloud management. Identifying instances of chaos and optimizing them are crucial to reduce your chances of being a ‘cloud dropout’.

   Information about numerous variables are determined by our experts as follows:

   • Understanding the reason behind your growing cloud expenses.
   • Understanding operational pain points that are adding towards the wastage of resources in the cloud.
   • Determining your current standards for the security of storage space and identifying opportunities for further optimization.
   • Understanding the type of stored data heads that the management relies upon for decision making.
   • Continuous Cloud Resource Monitoring to identify critical issues that are with optimum cloud usage and performance.
   • Identifying cost optimization opportunities that can be explored with your current cloud provider.
   • Understanding what type of cloud-only features your organization interacts with on a regular basis.

   To sum it up, we help you improve the management-level visibility of your cloud infrastructure so that you are more aware of the prevailing gaps.

2. Consolidation

   Once the organization is aware of the current cloud infrastructure, the consolidation process begins. This is the phase where we eliminate wastage and begin the process of standardization. Productive activities that constitute this phase include:

   • Removal of obsolete components of the cloud infrastructure, including unused EBS volumes or orphaned instances.
   • Review and overhauling of cloud-related security policies.
   • Calculation and reporting of cloud-related costs across multiple business functions and perspectives.
   • Optimization of computation costs through practices such as purchasing of reserved instances.
   • Increasing the visibility of the involved costs and performance heads to all the stakeholders in the organization.

   All in all, we set the right kind of baselines and provide constant vigilance to nurture your cloud environment.

3. Standardization

   A standard operating environment for your target infrastructure is identified in this phase. In essence, standardization is the process of coming up with cloud solutions that can:

   • Integrate data from existing tools like Chef, Puppet, and Pagerduty.
   • Provides valuable insights from the perspectives of both a cloud hypervisor and an operating system.
   • Provides business-related contextual information.

   In a bid to achieve this, we help you come up with a reference architecture that acts as a blueprint to drive the required operations on the cloud. This often involves collecting and analyzing copious amounts of contrasting data sets across supporting systems and tools. Although this was earlier possible only through an internal cloud infrastructure, we can help you achieve this even through external cloud environments. Items that we help you standardize include:

   • Critical performance drivers of the current and target workloads.
   • Optimization of cost and performance of the right instance types.
   • Usage of attached storage and availability zones.
   • Planning of the right kind of operational characteristics.
   • Optimization of cloud usage and the stored data.

4. Optimization

   Finally, the cloud infrastructure is optimized to the core to make an optimum use of the available resources. Our aim here is to provide you with a holistic view of your cloud ecosystem with the help of various tools that enable you to set baselines about the cloud and maintain them while maximizing the usage of the cloud and maintaining the performance across various workloads.

   Here is what we help you achieve post optimization:

   • Complete transparency about the cost of the cloud infrastructure along with the usage statistic and security reports.
   • Justification of the business costs through reference architecture for all types of workloads.
   • Optimization of efficiencies and infrastructure through documentation of policies.
   • Automated upscaling and downscaling of the cloud to manage all workload sizes.
   • Notifications about inefficient usage and deviations from reference architectures.
   • Setting up of closed-loop processes for the continuation of cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Optimization Services

We proactively interact with your cloud environment to integrate it with your business process with the help of a number of Cloud Optimization Services. These include:

All these services can together contribute to the overall improvement of the current cloud-based systems in your organization to ensure better opportunities for increasing the ROI of your business.

Cloud Platform