Top cloud management challenges

• Limited visibility and control: Managing workloads across different cloud platforms often leads to fragmented oversight, making it difficult to monitor performance, security and resource utilization. 
• Unoptimized costs: Without a unified cost management approach, organizations risk overspending due to underutilized resources or misaligned configurations.
• Security and compliance inconsistencies: Each cloud provider has unique security measures and compliance policies making it challenging to uphold consistency across platforms.
• Interoperability challenges: Integrating and orchestrating workloads between cloud environments can be complex, leading to inefficiencies.

To overcome these difficulties, organizations must take a strategic approach, leveraging automation, centralized management tools and cross-functional collaboration to streamline operations and enhance security. 

Recommendations for overcoming cloud management complexities

Successfully managing multiple cloud environments requires a proactive and strategic approach. Below are recommendations to address the common challenges. 

• Identify clear objectives: Establish a well-defined cloud strategy with measurable goals to ensure alignment with business needs and long-term success. 
• Foster cross-functional collaboration: Encourage IT, finance, security, and compliance teams to work together, ensuring cloud initiatives align with operational, financial and regulatory priorities. 
• Prioritize security and compliance: Embed security best practices from the start, implementing standardized policies and proactive risk management across all cloud environments. 
• Continuously optimize: Regularly assess cloud usage, cost efficiency, and performance to refine strategies, eliminate inefficiencies, and maximize value. 

How to future-proof your cloud management strategy

A resilient cloud management approach requires adaptability and continuous improvement.  

• Invest in scalable tools: Select a cloud management platform (CMP) that seamlessly supports multicloud and hybrid environments, providing flexibility as business needs evolve.  
• Embrace automation wisely: Leverage automation to streamline repetitive tasks and improve efficiency while maintaining human oversight for strategic decision-making. 
• Monitor trends: Continuously monitor emerging technologies, best practices and industry developments to ensure cloud strategies remain relevant and competitive. 
• Prioritize training: Equip teams with the latest cloud skills and knowledge to maximize efficiency, security and innovation. 

Measuring the success of cloud management strategies

To evaluate the effectiveness of a cloud management strategy, businesses should focus on the following metrics: 

• Cost savings: Measure reductions in cloud spend over time and compare against budgeted forecasts. 
• Resource utilization: Track how effectively cloud resources are used, minimizing waste while maintaining performance. 
• Performance: Monitor application uptime, response times, and user satisfaction to ensure optimal service delivery.  
• Security incidents: Evaluate the number of security threats detected, mitigated, and prevented to gauge risk management effectiveness. 
• Automation impact: Assess the percentage of routine tasks automated and the resulting time and resource savings. 

While managing multiple cloud environments comes with challenges, the right approach can transform cloud obstacles into opportunities. By leveraging a Cloud Management Platform (CMP), strategic automation and internal training, organizations can streamline the complexities of cloud management.  

Cloud management platform (CMP) overview

A cloud management platform is a centralized hub, enabling IT teams to efficiently manage, monitor, automate and optimize public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures. As cloud strategies become increasingly complex, companies turn to CMPs to bridge the gap between diverse platforms and unify cloud environments into a single, cohesive platform.  

Benefits of using a cloud management platform

A well-implemented CMP offers more than simplified cloud operations — it enhances efficiency, controls cloud costs, strengthens security and improves performance. Key benefits of CMPs include:  

Cost optimization

Reducing costs doesn’t mean cutting corners on performance. Instead, it’s about making data-driven decisions to maximise efficiency without sacrificing performance. A CMP provides actionable insights to decrease wasteful spending by assisting with the following:  

• Identifies unused or underutilized resources to rebalance and consolidate workloads accordingly
• Easily forecast and scale up or down as demand changes

Performance enhancements

Real-time monitoring ensures workloads run efficiently, helping avoid bottlenecks and reduce downtime. 

Automate operations

Routine tasks such as provisioning, scaling and workload balancing can be automated, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives.  

Enhance scalability

CMPs are designed to grow and adapt to business demands, making them a future-proof solution for evolving cloud strategies. 

Strengthen security and compliance  

Effective cloud management is pivotal in mitigating security risks and ensuring compliance in today’s threat landscape. CMPs provide built-in governance frameworks and automated policy enforcement to uphold compliance standards and regulations.  

• Centralizes security controls by enforcing consistent policies across all cloud environments 
• Simplifies compliance audits with automated reporting and governance, including GDPR, ISO 27001 or SOC2.  
• Provides real-time alerts with advanced monitoring tools to detect anomalies or potential breaches before they escalate. 

Cloud technologies and infrastructure will continue to evolve, and so will their complexities. A cloud management platform is essential for businesses looking to gain visibility and streamline processes for future agility.  

Compare & Contrast: On-Premises vs. Cloud Service Security

The on-prem versus cloud security debate continues within the data center industry. The differences range from minor to substantial, but both on-prem and cloud advocates can agree that countless protections and threats exist in either environment. Beyond focusing solely on meeting IT security priorities, the question is: which is more secure for my organization and its business objectives?

“The biggest challenge to data center security today is not physical threats but rather cyber threats. The proliferation of applications and burgeoning mounds of intellectual property and private information often governed by regulators — make data centers a central target for cybercriminals and even nation-states…the cyberattack surface for the data center is expanding and becoming increasingly harder to defend.

These threats can target physical devices and systems used to manage cooling and video surveillance, among others. They can also target personnel through spear phishing, gaps in authentication protocols, and other malicious means.”

– Digital Reality

Data Center Security Requirements & Standards

Requirements should be reviewed to understand how they will ensure and impact data center safety. Many industries demand unique security standards, involving a formal third-party auditing process to demonstrate compliance. Though complying with standards and requirements with all their details and steps appears daunting, these established best practices do shape a security response that can protect you from potential harm, downtime and data loss.

Industry security standards include:

• NIST 800-88 Guidelines for Media Sanitization
• HIPAA in healthcare
• FERPA in educational institutions
• PCI DSS for credit cards
• ISAE 3402 for data center financial reporting
• ISO 27001 Information Security Management System
• Standard—most widely-accepted certification for supporting information security, physical security, and business continuity

Regardless of industry, IT professionals should, at a minimum, be familiar with data center tiers and the kill chain standards. Uptime Institute’s Tier Classification System serves as a benchmark for ensuring maximum uptime. Lockheed Martin’s six-step Cyber Kill Chain® helps align defense strategies against cybercriminals.

What Does the Future of Data Center Security Look Like?

Cloud technology is trending now, but factors such as rising costs and security vulnerabilities are impacting its adoption. With more experience and a better understanding of the pros and cons, IT leaders are looking to a hybrid model for bringing together the scalability of the cloud with the control of on-premises data centers.