Imagine you are showing symptoms of a sickness. What do you do? Do you just ignore it or get treatment? Your sickness can affect every dimension in your life. Your productivity level, your energy and your social life can all take a toll if you’re not in the best shape. But what about your cloud health? Have your ever thought about how your cloud might get sick too? What if your cloud is unhealthy and not performing operations to its best capability? Find out if your cloud lacks proper management of your cloud resources and infrastructure, and how a cloud management platform can help you solve these challenges.

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) can be explained as a set of tools that solve cloud challenges and increase your ability to enjoy cloud benefits. In plain words, they simplify a complex cloud environment. Having a healthy cloud is one of the most important aspects of a successful enterprise. But some businesses fail to look at signs and symptoms their cloud is unhealthy and needs management. Know your cloud’s state by looking at these 9 symptoms and fixing them before it’s too late:

Cost Fever

Your cloud bills are always running high like a fever

Launching new services is a child’s play and so you end up doing it frequently without worrying about the consequences. The result? You’re stuck in a financial mismanagement limbo, and don’t know where and why you’re spending so much. This is because adding new services can be a costly agenda. The treatment is simple: ‘Cloud management platforms’. Unified cloud cost management gives you all data costs in a single pane (dashboard). With access and visibility to all your cloud spend, you can easily get immediate answers on why cost has spiked and the reason behind it.

Cloud management platforms also lend a helping hand when it comes to selecting multiple resources in cloud which perform the same function. You can get better insights regarding which resource to choose, by looking at spending trends provided by cloud management platforms. You also get insights on resources that have a higher spend without optimum utilization.

In a gist, cloud management platforms help you in overall cloud financial management by metering and allocating costs, using chargeback reports, invoicing users and forecasting future use. These features use real-time analysis, reporting and predictive analytics to automate cloud resource consumption tracking.

The lack of transparency among department spends is turning you into an insomniac

It’s inviting cost trouble if anyone in any of your IT department is able to purchase and spend on anything they wish, without a systematic order in place. Know exactly where each penny is going, by the tagging feature provided by CMPs. It helps you in analyzing resources by business units. Efficient tagging for your cloud infrastructure is a blessing in disguise that will save you piles of money in the future.

Cloud management platforms also gives you the option to group resources. You can easily find out how much each group is costing and which group’s performance is better. In turn, you will be able to take better crucial business decisions for your infrastructure. As a bonus, you will also be able to visualise and analyse the spending of various accounts in the same place.

You’re anxious and are always asking yourself: “Am I really spending on what I need”?

Is the ‘pay as you go’ model saving you money, or is it costing you more? If you don’t know which resources are underused and unused, you’re just throwing money away by paying for what you don’t need. Cloud management platforms help you to ‘save’ costs while using the ‘pay as you go’ model by tracking unused and underused resources. This way, you can put your money where your mouth is by identifying recurring costs.

Security Immunodeficiency

You have poor eyesight of your cloud’s security posture

While fixing one security threat, do you end up opening another? Are you not sure about what ports open? Are you unaware about the security risks of your account? Do you not know if you have the right logging in place? The solution to all these problems is simple: Cloud management platform’s record of security issues. They are the perfect spectacles for your security visibility issues. What’s more? There’s zero chance of manually overseeing them. You can use Botmetric’s security services to make your cloud bulletproof.

You’re clueless about how to diagnose (audit) your cloud infrastructure

You may not be aware of the security best practices used in the industry. This could potentially be a big fat problem. Why? There are many industries who would want to do business with you only if you are compliant with certain security standards like CIS, HIPAA and PCI-DSS. Manually checking if your infrastructure is compliant with such security standards is resource draining and tedious. With cloud management platforms, the best security practices along with security issues are all listed in one convenient place. So it’s easier to keep track of security threats and fix them. By now, you might be getting a picture of how CMPs can make your ‘cloud’ life easier. By giving you all the information you need in a single place, of course!

Your cloud migraine is prohibiting you from seeing who is provisioning what

In a large enterprise with many employees, it is next to impossible to manage and monitor cloud operations performed by each and every employee. You should see this as a security threat, as anyone can easily delete crucial resources and you may not even be aware of it due to the lack of a proper mechanism. That is where cloud management can fill in the gaps. It can give you a crystal clear idea of the resources created as well as deleted, by anyone who has access to cloud. In other words, cloud management platforms audit your infrastructure and gives information about critical actions performed by users who have infrastructure access.

Ops Cloud Management Headache

Continuous cleanup is making you anemic

You are completely in the dark about who created what snapshot because they are not tagged. And because of this, your backup resources are always piled up and you are blindsided about which ones to keep and which ones to delete. Manually checking each backup resource and continuous cleaning them up can be a tremendous task. Not only that, but you end up cleaning what is important, and waste resources in doing so. Manual maintenance of records is just not the answer because it’s not full proof. There is always a chance of human errors. With cloud management platforms, you get the perfect cure for the symptom of continuous cleanup with a proper automated system of maintaining backup records.

Your team has chronic fatigue due to performing too many manual infrastructure related tasks

As an enterprise, time is one of the most precious assets you have. Don’t waste it! Stop fixing the same bug over and over again. Haven’t you heard of the DevOps saying ‘Don’t work HARDER, work SMARTER.’ All you have to do is use automation instead of doing it yourself. Repetitive tasks like fixing the same bugs, patching, service crash, etc. can be simply automated using the IFTT approach. Take it one step higher. Use automation for triggering the same tasks as well.

Your infrastructure is not immune to disasters

Having a poor RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) in place, is like not wearing a bulletproof vest and going into battle. The two most important parameters of disaster recovery are objectives you should keep in mind while choosing a data backup plan.

For efficient RPO, data needs to be stored in different remote locations. This is handled by your cloud provider, but it is up to you to store sufficient number of backups in your cloud. Manually keep track of different regions or zones is laborious and problematic. Cloud management platforms simplifies this task by spoonfeeding you the information about various regions, as well as information about where your backup is already stored.

Zero downtime service maybe on your cloud wishlist. But without a good RTO, you are sentenced to face huge losses. And any error in manually doing it can cost you a lot. But don’t worry. Cloud management platforms have your back. They will serve as your protective blanket to ensure you have sufficient backup of recoverable servers in different zones or regions. Say goodbye to server downtimes for even 5 minutes. Say goodbye to losses for you and your customers!

If you are suffering from any one or more of the above symptoms, you know which pill to take. Get the CMP treatment and wave goodbye to cloud management deficiency. CMPs provide general services, service management, resource management and financial management to ensure that your cloud is in its prime health. Confused about which CMP to choose? No worries. Botmetric an intelligent and unified cloud management platform has the cure for all your cloud symptoms. You can even test drive it by using Botmetric’s free 14 day trial. So get ready to experience advanced cloud performance with enhanced security at low costs! Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for latest updates.