What Does Cloud Infrastructure Management Entail?

Successful businesses soon learn that some tasks are better left to the specialists, even if they really could be done in-house. This applies to everything from hiring a team of painters to spruce up your headquarters to turning the whole process of hiring and payroll processing over to an outside HR firm. 

When it comes to cloud services, the reasons to migrate operations to AWS (or build them there in the first place) are already clear to a lot of businesses. Whether it’s the increased scalability AWS offers, the improved cost efficiency, a desire to make use of new technologies and services, or simply wanting to get out of the data center business, the appeal of AWS is widespread.

But while it’s certainly possible to set up and manage your cloud services yourself, it might not be something you want to take on. Once you select and deploy server instances, you have the responsibility of maintaining that infrastructure. You’ll need to provide in-depth server monitoring, keep track of changes and performance, and enable your systems to stay up-to-date and free of security vulnerabilities with existing patches. And on top of that, you’ll need to also keep track of how much you’re spending and optimize those costs. 

According to the 2020 Flexera State Of The Cloud Report, optimizing cloud spend has been the top cloud initiatives for enterprises four years in a row. With that said, many organizations are currently struggling in this arena, particularly as they relate to overspending.  Gartner has forecast that “through 2020, 80% of organizations will overshoot their cloud IaaS budgets due to a lack of cost optimization approaches.” Many Infrastructure and Operations teams, the study continued, are still set up on traditional data center principles, and they don’t have the necessary organizational processes to manage cloud costs. In fact, the report also found that 40% of IaaS instances were provisioned with more resources than the workload needed.

With that said, the challenges that organizations are facing in the cloud are not just limited to cost optimization. In fact, from that same Flexera report,  83% of enterprises named security as a top challenge, 79% named governance, while 56% of organizations said understanding the cost implications of software licenses was their top issue.

Ultimately, managing all of these tasks effectively requires time and effort. If you are handling all of these components of cloud infrastructure management by yourself, you’re allocating a significant portion of your time managing infrastructure that could be better spent growing your business. 

Let the specialists handle it

You don’t have to manage your cloud infrastructure alone. You can leverage an AWS managed service provider like Mission to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. One of Mission’s core services, Mission Cloud One, is a comprehensive AWS managed cloud service designed to maintain your AWS infrastructure, lower operational costs, improve performance, and provide ongoing support.

With Mission Cloud One, our team of AWS-certified experts handles the day-to-day responsibilities of monitoring, operating, and optimizing your AWS environment. This includes:

• Proactive infrastructure management, including backup and patching
• Real-time, 24/7 monitoring of your AWS services, servers, and websites, with an average alert response time of less than five minutes
• Regular account reviews to analyze performance metrics and the overall health of your environment
• Best-in-class tooling with products like New Relic One and CloudHealth
• Up to ten hours of provisioning requests per month for new common resources or other standard changes
• Ongoing cloud optimization recommendations and support
  

To learn more about how Mission Cloud One can help you meet your goals as they relate to security, cost optimization, licensing, and more, contact us today.