* By Fernando Cardoso
Cloud computing has been the new norm for companies for some years, and has brought three main concepts regarding the construction and design of their infrastructure. In turn, these concepts can help companies understand their level of maturity and preparation for this environment. Let's look at these three concepts.
Cloud migration
Migration to the cloud environment is a transition, not an abrupt move. For an organization, hybrid cloud is the environment with physical, virtual and cloud workloads. Usually companies start by migrating their monolithic applications or physical and virtual servers to cloud providers. The main objective here is to start using services like IaaS, PaaS and SaaS from major cloud providers like Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle. Typically, organizations have challenges in adapting their current applications, such as security and data center management systems, to cloud service providers. This is mainly because these technologies do not adapt very well to these new environments.
Native cloud application
This is the fast delivery stage, frequently tested, using Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC), DevOps pipelines, code reuse, open source, containers and public code repositories. At this stage, organizations begin to consume native cloud solutions, such as containers as services, without a server, cloud storage, CI / CD tools and Kubernetes. They often do this at various cloud service providers to try to get the best performance, cost and functionality. There is usually a change in the application architecture, from monolithic to microservices, to a more agile, highly scalable and independently deployable design, which facilitates the launch of new features and the maintenance of the current code.
Cloud governance and operational excellence
At this stage, organizations are forming teams to achieve cloud governance and operational excellence centers. Typically, at this level, companies are leveraging native cloud applications, but are not optimized or following best practices recommended by provider structures or global standards such as PCI DSS, NIST and HIPAA. They assemble these teams to standardize processes, making the environment more repeatable and consistent, and to avoid errors when creating or updating new applications for their business units.
In addition, companies want to optimize infrastructure costs, support consistent security checks across multiple cloud providers, and manage business risks for multiple geographic regions and services in highly complex environments. They need assurance that cloud services are not left unsafe, that they meet internal governance requirements and that they meet specific standards and compliance structures.
Why are cloud governance and operational excellence important?
The old model of having systems only in local environments allows companies to have control over who has access to data, servers, specific networks and measure security risks and costs. This is because the entire infrastructure, network and storage systems occur under a single team, that of infrastructure and network (this can change according to the company). In the cloud model, you can easily lose that control, because most of the time the business units have their own teams of DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE) and cloud architects, who, in turn, can use different providers for the application they are working on.
However, creating access, cost, security and compliance rules for data and applications in the cloud is a little tricky. If not done correctly, companies can lose the agility and benefits of cloud services. Governance in this environment ensures that everything from asset deployment to system interactions and data security is properly considered, examined, monitored, protected and managed.
Moving from a normal data center to a cloud environment adds layers of complexity to your architecture that need to be considered and validated. Operational excellence, on the other hand, includes the ability to support the development of cloud workloads effectively, while helping the company obtain information about its operations. The result will be continuous improvement in processes and procedures that will provide true business value.
* Fernando Cardoso is a solution architect at Trend Micro
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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