Cloud Infrastructure Management: Challenges, Best Practices & More

Unintended cloud resource growth, known as cloud sprawl, is a common pitfall for organizations. This digital clutter increases costs, security vulnerabilities, and operational inefficiencies. To regain control and optimize cloud spending, cloud infrastructure management is crucial. But what is cloud infrastructure management? In this article, we'll explore this concept in detail. 

Many organizations rely on cloud infrastructure to streamline their operations. From running websites and applications to storing data, the cloud has become an integral part of modern business. But with this shift comes hidden challenges, like having limited visibility into distributed applications, unwanted data stored in the cloud, increased storage costs, security risks, and more.

So, to ensure your cloud infrastructure doesn't burden you, managing it becomes crucial. But how can one manage cloud infrastructure? This is where cloud infrastructure management comes in. What is cloud infrastructure management? How is it beneficial? We'll explore everything in this blog. So, read on to understand. 

What is Cloud Infrastructure Management?

Cloud infrastructure management is an end-to-end process of managing, monitoring, and optimizing resources (cloud components) and services that make up a cloud computing environment. 

During this process, IT teams manage the entire lifecycle of cloud resources, from setting up and configuring them to maintaining and optimizing them and eventually retiring them when they're no longer needed. The ultimate aim is to ensure that the cloud environment runs smoothly, that computing resources are used efficiently and securely, and that the company's goals are aligned.

However, to understand this better, you must be well-versed with the cloud infrastructure components and types. So, let's take a quick look at them.

Components Of Cloud Infrastructure

The following 3 key components are fundamental parts that make a cloud infrastructure:

1. Compute Resources: Compute resources (like hardware, software, and virtual machines) are the core components of cloud infrastructure. These resources provide the processing power needed to run cloud applications and manage various workloads efficiently.
2. Storage Solution: Storage solutions are essential for saving (storing) and accessing your data. They offer flexible and reliable services that can handle large volumes of data with ease. Also, there are different types of data storage options available, such as block storage, object storage, and file storage; you can choose the one that meets your storage needs. Each type has its own advantages and is suited for different purposes, depending on how you need to store and access your data.
3. Network: The network is crucial for connecting various parts of the cloud environment. It ensures that data can be transferred and communicated effectively between different users, services, and components. But how does it do that? It uses different networking tools like routers, load balancers, switches, and firewalls to maintain secure and efficient connections.

Types Of Cloud Infrastructure

Here are 3 main types of cloud infrastructure:

1. Public Cloud Infrastructure

Third-party companies set up this cloud infrastructure. Besides, these service providers own and manage all the necessary cloud resources (hardware, software, servers, storage, network) and make this infrastructure available for multiple organizations to use (shared setup). They can easily access the cloud infrastructure from anywhere with an internet connection, offering convenience and flexibility. 

Furthermore, this public cloud infrastructure is perfect for small—to medium-sized businesses that don't want to make significant upfront investments in setting up and managing cloud resources.

Note: Third-party providers offer a 'pay-as-you-go' option. This option allows organizations to pay only for the cloud resources they are actually using.

2. Private Cloud Infrastructure

This cloud computing infrastructure is dedicated exclusively to a single organization. Unlike public clouds, where resources are shared among multiple users, private clouds ensure that authorized users share all resources (hardware and software) internally. This setup offers high control over the cloud environment, maintains security, and allows for customization, making it ideal for managing sensitive data.

Furthermore, this cloud setup is particularly suited for larger organizations that run their own data center and have the budget to support it. 

Note: A private cloud can either be set up and managed within the company's own data center or hosted by an external company. Regardless of where it is hosted, the resources in a private cloud are used only by that one organization, ensuring that no other companies share the same infrastructure.

2. Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

A hybrid cloud environment combines public and private cloud infrastructure. In a hybrid setup, organizations use a mix of on-premises private cloud resources and public cloud computing services. 

This combination of setup allows businesses to take advantage of the benefits offered by both cloud types. With a hybrid cloud, organizations can store sensitive data and important applications in a private cloud for better security and control. At the same time, they can use public cloud services for less sensitive tasks or for handling fluctuating workloads. This setup offers flexibility, allowing organizations to switch between private and public clouds as needed to meet their specific business requirements and priorities.

Now that you understand cloud infrastructure management, let's proceed further and understand what challenges organizations encounter while managing cloud models. These insights will help you understand how to avoid these pitfalls through effective management.

Challenges Of Managing Cloud Infrastructure

Listed below are some of the common challenges organizations encounter while managing cloud infrastructure:

Challenge 1: Limited Visibility Into Distributed Applications

Applications that are spread out across different systems (known as distributed applications) generate different types of data, such as performance data, network data, infrastructure data, and more. Since these data are scattered across multiple locations, it is extremely difficult for IT teams to gain a complete view of the entire application delivery chain or application performance. Also, this lack of visibility due to the dispersion of data makes it challenging to track the exact source of issues, which results in potential delays in issue resolution.

Challenge 2: Siloed Data & Services

Siloed data & services (a situation where data & services are isolated/ cut off and not integrated with others) is one of the significant challenges organizations face while managing cloud models. When data and services are isolated within different systems or departments, gaining complete visibility into the cloud environment becomes difficult. This limited visibility further complicates the management and monitoring of cloud infrastructure performance. Not only that, siloed data give rise to duplication of information. This means the same data is being stored in multiple locations, which can further cause inaccuracies in data.

Challenge 3: Cloud Security Challenge

This challenge stems from the dynamic nature of the cloud environment, where resources/cloud infrastructure components are constantly being changed (added, modified, or removed). This inconsistency makes it challenging for the IT team to implement consistent security measures. For example, you deployed a virtual machine for your cloud infrastructure. Now, to ensure the security of this VM, you will need to implement different/ unique security measures. Additionally, whenever the VM undergoes updates or changes, the security measures must be adjusted or updated to address new security requirements. 

Challenge 4: Compliance Challenge

Organizations need to adhere to different compliance regulations that change over time. They need to deal with different regulatory requirements depending on where they operate, their industry, and the type of data they handle. How is this a challenge? Keeping up with different compliance requirements can be time-consuming and complicated. Moreover, ensuring that all aspects of cloud infrastructure meet these regulatory requirements can be resource-intensive.

These challenges can be addressed by implementing an effective cloud infrastructure management process. But how? Let's find out.

Benefits Of Cloud Infrastructure Management

Below, we've listed a few benefits of cloud infrastructure management. These benefits will help you overcome the previously mentioned challenges, enhancing your ability to manage and optimize your cloud environment effectively.

• Provides Complete Visibility & Control Over Your Cloud Environment 

Cloud infrastructure management enables you to track your cloud resources and identify — what resources you have, who has access to them, how they are being used, and where their data is being stored. This visibility allows you to stay ahead of cloud sprawl, which refers to the uncontrolled growth and spread of cloud resources. 

Cloud infrastructure also helps prevent data and services from becoming siloed or isolated and disconnected from the rest of the infrastructure. But how? Cloud infrastructure management mandates maintaining an inventory of all the cloud resources. This inventory provides insights into which data or services are isolated, allowing you to bring them back into the integrated infrastructure. This helps ensure all data and services are connected, accessible, and effectively utilized.

• Maintains Data Security & Helps Adhere To Regulatory Compliance

Effective cloud infrastructure management helps maintain a secure and well-governed cloud environment through continuous monitoring and the implementation of security measures. Continuous monitoring allows you to detect and mitigate threats early, reducing the risk of security breaches. Implementing security measures like encryption and firewalls helps secure data stored in the cloud from unauthorized users or cyberattacks. 

Additionally, effective compliance management also involves conducting compliance checks that help ensure that the cloud infrastructure consistently meets industry standards and regulatory requirements. This minimizes the risk of facing non-compliance and paying hefty penalties.

• Helps Optimize Cloud Cost

Cloud infrastructure management helps optimize cloud spend by closely monitoring how cloud resources are used and predicting future costs. It does this by:

1. Tracking Cloud Spend: It monitors and analyzes how much is spent on cloud resources, helping predict future expenses. This allows you to plan and allocate the budget to cloud resources accordingly.

2. Generating detailed reports: It creates reports showing how much different departments or projects use and what they cost. This helps you understand where the money is going and find ways to cut costs.

Now that you have understood the benefits of cloud infrastructure, let's explore best practices that will help enhance the effectiveness of cloud infrastructure management.

Cloud Infrastructure Management Best Practices 

Listed below are some best practices for cloud infrastructure management:

1. List Down What You Have In Your Cloud Infrastructure To Gain Better Clarity 

First, you need to gain a holistic view of your cloud resources. This means understanding exactly what you have in your cloud infrastructure. Because unless and until you don't know what cloud resources you have, how will you even manage them? 

So, create an inventory of your cloud resources, meaning list (record) whatever you have in your infrastructure, such as computing resources, networks, and storage solutions. However, don't limit yourself to listing the resources; analyze their current state and how they might grow.

Having this clear picture is crucial, as it will help you develop a cloud strategy and effectively manage your cloud infrastructure.

Note: Make sure to maintain an up-to-date inventory of cloud resources for optimal management and control.

2. Understand Your Cloud Resource Usage 

Once you have listed the cloud resources, dive deeper and find out how they are being used, who has access to them, the associated cost, storage requirements, whether they are secure, and other information. 

With these valuable insights, you can effectively manage your cloud infrastructure. For instance, you can utilize your cloud storage capacity in the most effective way possible (reducing unnecessary storage expenses). You can also identify potential security threats and take preventive measures like implementing encryption and access control to safeguard your critical resources and data.

3. Make Use Of Cloud Management Tools

There are many repetitive tasks that one needs to perform during cloud infrastructure management, like provisioning resources, adjusting their size, monitoring their performance, and auditing to gain visibility into storage. These tasks can be easily automated with the help of cloud infrastructure management tools. These tools will save time, streamline business operations, and reduce the likelihood of inaccuracies when these tasks are done manually.

For example:

• You can implement Terraform to provision and manage resources. What is Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform designed to provision and manage resources in any cloud infrastructure or data center. How does it work? This cloud management platform uses code to set up (provision) and manage servers, databases, and firewalls. Instead of manually configuring everything, you write scripts to do it. This makes the process faster, more consistent, and easier to update. 

It also seamlessly integrates with your existing tools and workflows, like version control, CI/CD pipelines, and IT service management tools. This integration allows you to use what you already have without making a big change in your processes or opting for a new tool to do the same. It helps smooth the setup process and ensures everything runs consistently for both platform teams and developers.

• You can implement Azure Monitor to monitor your cloud infrastructure. What is Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is an automated monitoring solution that helps you track and monitor how your applications and services are performing. How does it do that? It automatically gathers data from all parts of your system, whether those parts are in the cloud (like on Azure) or on your own servers (on-premises), and stores them in one place. This data further helps analyze how well your cloud-based applications and services work, making it easier to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Azure also supports seamless integration with other Microsoft and cloud provider tools, making it a versatile solution for monitoring and managing your IT infrastructure.

• You can implement Lucidity to gain visibility into your cloud storage. What is Lucidity? 

Lucidity provides a storage audit solution that automatically performs a thorough analysis of your current block storage usage. This analysis identifies idle volumes, over-provisioned storage, spending on storage, and potential downtime risks. With these insights, Lucidity helps reduce cloud storage costs by up to 70% by eliminating unnecessary storage.

But how does it exactly work? Lucidity employs a straightforward yet powerful approach. It utilizes executable tools designed to seamlessly integrate with your cloud environments . This integration helps collect precise data on storage consumption and disk sizes. With this granular information, you can make informed decisions about optimizing your storage spending.

That's not all; Lucidity generates detailed reports and logs and stores them in Linux or Windows directories, making it easier for you to access them when needed. For instance, these reports can help you track storage trends, identify anomalies, and proactively address potential issues. This will ultimately help streamline your storage management and maximize cloud storage cost-efficiency.

Cloud Infrastructure Management: A Way To Get Complete Control Over Your Cloud Setup

In conclusion, managing cloud infrastructure—whether public, private, or hybrid—can be challenging due to the involvement of unique components (computing resources, virtual networks, and storage solutions). Why? Each component requires careful attention and monitoring, which can be quite time-consuming. Also, as the organization grows and introduces more of these cloud resources, it becomes difficult to keep track of them and end up having limited visibility into their cloud environment. On top of it, keeping them secure and compliant and making them work together seamlessly makes it even harder to manage these resources. 

Fortunately, with effective cloud infrastructure management, you can overcome these hurdles easily. However, cloud infrastructure management is not limited to tackling these challenges; it also unlocks the full potential of your cloud environment. But to avail these benefits, you need to ensure effective implementation of cloud infrastructure management, and to do so; you need to implement best practices, such as listing your cloud resources, understanding their usage, and utilizing advanced management tools. Implementing these practices creates an efficient, reliable, secure, and well-governed cloud environment.