Cloud Ops is the Future: Why You Should Move Your IT Operations to the Cloud
There’s a lot of potential in the cloud.
Decentralized cloud infrastructure allows you greater flexibility, reliability, and agility than on-premises hardware. Armed with the right platform, you’ll always have the resources you need for any given operation - no more and no less. More importantly, automated cloud disaster recovery and backups help ensure you rarely, if ever, need to concern yourself with service outages or unscheduled downtime.
Of course, this is just in the near-term. As reported by business publication Forbes, last year’s Mobile World Congress explored just a few of the ways cloud computing will be integral to our society in future years:
- Smart cities with driverless transit networks.
- Commercial aviation clouds that allow airlines to operate more efficiently and effectively.
- A cloud network that automatically detects and repairs faults in the power grid.
- An AI-driven financial services cloud network that constantly and consistently scans for signs of fraud.
At the risk of sounding cliche, the sky's the limit.
On a slightly smaller scale, cloud computing is and will continue to be transformative within the enterprise. Advanced analytics platforms will give you greater insights into your business’s operations than you could have ever dreamed possible. The capacity to automate repetitive, unnecessary tasks in development and infrastructure management will free up your IT staff to focus on other, more important matters.
In short, everything will become safer, more efficient, and better-managed. But how exactly do you reach this future yourself? Assuming you haven’t already shifted your operations to the cloud, how can you take the first steps toward Cloud Ops?
As noted by David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at analyst firm Deloitte Consulting, the first step lies in rethinking the traditional approach to IT operations. The biggest difference, he explains, is that while traditional operations are focused on mitigating and managing downtime, Cloud operations are uninterrupted and continuous.
There are other differences, of course. Since the cloud is decentralized and distributed, it’s infrastructure-agnostic, greatly scalable, and stateless. Development and deployment procedures must be updated to account for this, allowing software and platforms to be put into production without any service interruptions.
Linthicum advises organizations to assess, understand, and strategically plan out their needs where cloud operations are concerned, creating processes and selecting CloudOps tools accordingly. Beyond that, he notes the connection between CloudOps and DevOps. To have one, it’s advisable to understand the other.
CloudOps is indisputably the future of the business world, just as the cloud is the foundation of digital transformation. It’s imperative that you understand this, and take measures to incorporate CloudOps into your own IT department.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself scrambling to do it amidst a marketplace that’s left you behind.