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You did it. You made the leap to the cloud. But migrating your infrastructure, platforms, and workloads to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud is just the first step. If you don’t closely and continuously monitor your cloud environments, you leave yourself wide open to costly mistakes that can seriously hurt your bottom line.
Cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google give you access to incredibly powerful tools and technologies. Yet, their suites of cloud services are extraordinarily flexible (giving customers an significant level of control), that flexibility and configurability means you and your team need to fully understand the repercussions of every single configuration decision you make.
Make the wrong move in the cloud, and you can rack up massive unexpected costs or suffer application failures and service disruptions that negatively impact your customers, employees, and revenue.
Make the right moves however, and you unleash innovation to gain strategic advantages over less cloud-savvy competitors. Position cloud as a true business driver rather than just a new place to run IT infrastructure, and revenue-generating digital products and services can flourish across your organization.
This guide will explore the top five costly cloud mistakes that torpedo bottom lines, as well as how employing continuous Cloud Service and Product Management (CSPM) strategy helps sidestep issues to sail towards security, resilience, and savings.
The beauty of pay-as-you-go cloud pricing is that you only pay for what you actually use each month. However, the danger is that money leaks out from unused cloud resources you leave running. Here's how to rein in your cloud budget:
Double check that workloads are sized right to avoid paying for capacity that sits idle. Simply shutting down dev and test clusters during off-hours can tap huge savings.
Use auto-scaling tools that automatically spin resources up or down matching real-time demand.
Maximize what you already have before paying more. Tactics like oversubscribing CPUs let you squeeze out that extra utilization carefully, just watch that performance doesn't suffer.
Lock in discounts on predictably steady workloads with reserved instance plans versus paying full price on-demand each hour.
Ongoing oversight with a service like CSPM spots waste, dials in savings, and keeps your cloud environs lean yet fast by enforcing sensible policies around right-sizing - preventing profit leakage month over month.
The large cloud providers bake tons of security protections right into their tools and platforms. However, their flexibility means you’re still on the hook for dialing in security configurations tailored to your needs. Slacking on that responsibility leaves data exposed. Common oversights include:
Leaving network ports wide open beyond legitimate business requirements
Granting individual user permissions that are way too permissive when least privilege would do
Forgetting to enable encryption on sensitive data - both stored and in transit
Not turning on threat monitoring services like AWS GuardDuty
A service like CSPM runs continuous automated checks to catch insecure settings and alerts you instantly - no manual audits needed. Baked-in Infrastructure as Code lets you embed security guardrails directly into provisioning pipelines for preventative protection on autopilot.
So don't give your cloud a security free pass. Put disciplined oversight in place to catch missteps before they bite you. Encrypt broadly, restrict access tightly, track activity closely, and align configurations to policies automatically with a helping hand from CSPM.
Cloud platforms give you an endless buffet of building block options to craft a customized technology stack - servers, databases, security services, you name it. But with so many ways to combine those ingredients, it's easy to cook up a suboptimal blueprint that leaves your apps slow, wobbly, or limited. Watch for things like:
Gluing services together so tightly that they can't scale properly or recover well from failures. Loosely coupling is smarter.
Hosting a high traffic web app on basic single-zone infrastructure lacking redundancies to stay up through hiccups.
Getting stuck with proprietary databases or wares that box you into one vendor. That hurts flexibility.
CSPM reviews your architecture plans using proven patterns to catch flaws like these before you ever provision. Simply put, it double checks your "recipes" adhere to time-tested "cooking" standards around performance, resilience, security and more. And it'll intervene with alerts if a blueprint looks questionable so you can adjust.
Because even with an endless array of cloud options, you have got to architect wisely to create an IT environment that won't crumble under pressure. CSPM helps prevent you from crafting a mess.
Migrating to the public cloud usually involves meshing together infrastructure and services across regions, accounts, and providers. Before long you've got this convoluted web of cloud aps spanning who knows how many services and pieces. Without centralized visibility and control, quite a few things can go wrong:
Engineers waste endless hours trying to trace performance problems bouncing between interconnected services.
Security gaps get missed with such fragmented visibility.
Runaway cloud spend goes unseen with budgets fragmented across groups.
Teams rebuild existing cloud solutions again and again, unclear what already got built where.
CSPM delivers that missing oversight by stitching together operational, security, cost and other telemetry across your clouds - on prem too. This unified view allows all kinds of benefits:
Cloud admins gain clear end-to-end insights to track down multilayer issues fast.
Consistency improves by enforcing unified policies, architectures, etc.
Cost optimization spots waste and enforces cross-cloud budgets.
An application catalog connects teams to reuse what’s already available.
Consolidated guardrails prevent errors and oversights falling through cracks.
In other words, CSPM oversight allows your cloud environments to drive innovation rather than deterioration.
One of the bigger selling points of the cloud is accelerating how fast you can build and deploy apps. Self-service infrastructure, managed services, and lean DevOps options let developers do their thing faster. But without tracking objective speed metrics, it's easy to overhype vague velocity claims (and underdeliver in reality). So be sure you instrument telemetry across environments measuring just how much cloud adoption accelerates key benchmarks:
Are developers actually provisioning cloud resources faster thanks to self-service?
Have deployment lead times really gotten shorter with cloud-native CI/CD pipelines?
Does feature release frequency show material gains since adopting DevOps practices?
CSPM can benchmark then showcase metrics proving where and how much cloud investments specifically speed up application delivery like:
Infrastructure access via APIs bypassing old ticket processes
Release frequency powered by automated testing/pipelines
Change success rates improved by policy safeguards
Manual task overhead reduced by consolidated cloud platforms
Quantifiable data is key to demonstrating cloud ROI and keeping leadership supportive of further cloud adoption. Because fuzzy velocity math that doesn't add up will only prompt skepticism. So stay objective tracking cloud speed gains.
Migrating business systems to the cloud unlocks game-changing velocity, efficiency, and innovation - but only with continuous oversight safeguarding operations, security, costs, and architecture every step of the way. CSPM provides the multi-layer guardrails and policy enforcement needed to prevent simple cloud misconfigurations from cascading into costly mistakes.
