by : OpSourced Support Team
June 07, 2023
For many companies, cloud infrastructure, or the components of a cloud computing system, have become very important. These systems have become essential for the daily operations of a business. With so much of your business being dependent on your cloud infrastructure working correctly, standardization and the adoption of best practices for your cloud provider is something you should look into.
Standardization of cloud infrastructure services is important for businesses where their cloud is pivotal to their operations. While it can be a difficult or large task to take on, it can also bring a lot of benefits to your business. Standardizing your cloud infrastructure can improve efficiency and security while saving you money and time.
If you’re interested in standardizing cloud infrastructure but are concerned about the size and time commitment of the task, working with a consulting company can help. Contact us today to speak with one of our experienced DevOps engineers and learn more about how we can help you with your infrastructure needs.
Most of our clients contact us with the intention of working with a partner to optimize their cloud infrastructure. Standarization is rarely on their minds as part of that process, however standardization is an important step in optimizing your infrastructure.
When working with a company like OpSourced, standardizing your infrastructure will be one of our first optimization steps. Standardizing your infrastructure provides a lot of benefits that can simplify and optimize your infrastructure and how it works for you.
Cloud infrastructure standardization is the process of establishing and adhering to a set of uniform guidelines, practices, and configurations for the design, deployment, and management of cloud-based infrastructure components. It involves defining and implementing standardized templates, configurations, and processes to ensure consistency and efficiency across the organization’s cloud infrastructure.
Typically, standarization includes the following:
• Resource provisioning
• Creating uniform security and access controls
• Setting up monitoring and management tools
• Establishing compliance and governance standards
• Setting up automation and orchestration standardized processes for future use
• Standarization is the pathway to optimization. While optimization is much more of a buzz word in cloud computing you’re probably familiar with, standarization is essential to the whole process.
Standardization of cloud infrastructure can benefit your business in a wide range of ways. These are some of the most noticeable benefits, but there will be other benefits throughout your entire infrastructure and daily workflows.
The largest benefit of standardizing your infrastructure in the cloud is consistency. Standardization allows all of your resources to be configured and tracked the same way. This can help prevent errors and make maintenance easier as it avoids the challenges of varied environments.
For your engineers, standardization reduces the time and effort required to manage the cloud infrastructure. Standardized infrastructure also helps to simplify individual tasks and troubleshooting, which reduces downtime and improves efficiency.
Standardizing cloud server infrastructure can also help improve your security practices. By standardizing your entire infrastructure, you can be sure all of your resources are configured to the best practices and security standards. A standardized and consistent infrastructure also allows you to have complete visibility into your operating environments, which can increase the control of your assets and your security and compliance standards.
Cost savings is another major benefit of standardization. Standardization allows you to eliminate any inefficient practices and unnecessary resources, which can help you save on labor and infrastructure costs. This also helps highlight more efficient ways to use your people and resources. Standardized and streamlined management and operations allow lower operating costs, faster deployment, and improved productivity.
Working with a standardized infrastructure can also give you more flexibility in the future. With a standard environment, it will be easier to integrate new services into the infrastructure without interrupting operations.
Standardizing cloud infrastructure provides a lot of benefits, but it can bring some challenges or apprehension from businesses or employees.
One of the main resistances to standardizing infrastructure is that people can be resistant to change. Many people tend to think that their way of doing things, or “the way we’ve always done it,” is better than less familiar options and won’t welcome the idea of having to learn a new resource or workflow.
Differences between teams within your company can also bring resistance to standardized cloud infrastructure. Different teams or groups within your organization might have different setups or preferred methods involving tools that could make standardization difficult. In this situation, it’s important to work with the teams to include what’s most important from their current way of working.
The process of completely standardizing and automating your cloud infrastructure can be complex. To make sure that all systems are configured correctly with the necessary tools and technology, there has to be a lot of planning before the standardization can start. Often an infrastructure audit is the first step in finding where you need to change standardization to make improvements.
Working with a consulting company like OpSourced for your cloud infrastructure standardization can help remove all of these challenges. Our DevOps engineers can use their experience optimizing and standardizing cloud infrastructures to help solve technology differences between teams while planning your infrastructure. They can also train your teams on the new systems to make the transition easier.
Working with a consultant engineer for your optimization or standardization helps take away the complexity and stress because they have experience with a variety of different environments and businesses. It’s often also easier to have an outsider from your organization guide you through infrastructure changes, paving the way for your business’ progress toward a more efficient infrastructure.
Following these best practices will help make the standardization of cloud infrastructure a smoother process. Our experienced consultants are skilled at efficiently implementing all of these practices into standardization practices to help guide our clients toward better outcomes.
An important first step in standardizing cloud infrastructure that can help make sure your standardization is useful and effective is to inventory all tools and services to determine what needs to be standardized. It is likely that some tools or services aren’t being used and can be excluded from the standardization process. This inventory will also help ensure that all necessary tools and services can work and be accessible in the new environment.
Before starting the standardization process, creating a set of guidelines is important. These will be followed during the standardization process and by all teams going forward. Making a set of guidelines will help your standardization be successful and lasting as different teams work in the infrastructure.
Once your cloud infrastructure has been standardized, it’s important to help your team transition to the new infrastructure. OpSourced engineers can help train your team on how to use your newly standardized cloud infrastructure.
After your standardized infrastructure is complete, it’s important to monitor it to make sure that it’s working as expected and is meeting all of the desired goals. We offer Managed DevOps Services that can help with this monitoring. After the initial consulting has been completed, one of our DevOps engineers can continue to work with you to take the workload of operations and infrastructure management off of your team.
Standardizing cloud infrastructure can benefit businesses in a variety of different ways. Not only can standardization improve your efficiency and productivity, but it can also help make work easier for your employees.
Working with a consulting company can make the standardization process easier for you. Consultants have experience with standardization that most in-house employees can’t offer and the ability to work without taking time and attention away from other projects for your company.
Our entire team is experienced DevOps Engineers. Contact OpSourced today to learn more about how working with consultants for infrastructure standardization can help your business.
