As an organization when you decide to adopt a Public Cloud platform, you are truly embarking on a journey that has many phases, each phase has various set of activities that need to be performed and once your first initiative is successfully deployed on the cloud platform then you have to ensure that you are setup for long term success with comprehensive ongoing monitoring, management, security and supportability that you can depend on.
This whole process will be repeated in parts full and partial across the various phases of the cloud adoption journey as you take on ever newer initiatives on the cloud platform for your company.
The cloud adoption journey for an organization quite quickly morphs into Cloud Lifecycle Management – it is an intentional transition that successful organizations make to ensure their continued stability and success on cloud. Think of this on same lines as other lifecycles in technology such as Software Development Lifecycle, IT asset lifecycle, Hardware Refresh Lifecycle, Application Lifecycle Management etc. that are put in place and practiced to ensure successful execution and management.
Here is a functional view of the Cloud Lifecyle that has to be successfully executed and managed:
A typical Cloud Lifecyle as 3 phases: Strategy & Roadmap, Execution & Engineering and Ongoing Monitoring, Management & Supportability. These 3 phases have their own specific set of activities that need to be performed for successful completion of that phase.
An organization will either have its internal team(s) own and execute Cloud Lifecycle Management or more likely scenario is that they will have a vendor who are called ‘Cloud Managed Services Providers’ or MSPs to help with complete cloud lifecycle management from assessments & proof of concepts to development and set up of complex cloud deployments built with best practices, to ongoing monitoring, management and support. This cycle continues as MSPs thereon work on new cloud-based initiatives per customer’s needs.
The goal of cloud lifecycle management is to manage the dynamic nature of the cloud environment, accelerating provisioning, facilitating flexibility, and rapidly meeting the needs of the business. With good Cloud Lifecycle Management solution, organizations can deliver flexible, customizable cloud services while maintaining a structured, controlled, and dynamic IT environment.
The key benefits of a cloud lifecycle management solution include, among many others, these below:
Accelerating the delivery of cloud services in response to business needs.
Automating provisioning and workflows, both for speed and cost savings.
Enabling users to request flexible configurable cloud services for their specific use cases.
Supporting the use of public cloud infrastructures to augment internal resources.
Maximizing resource utilization by ensuring unused cloud services are reclaimed.
Ongoing monitoring and remediation of infrastructure and applications.
Comprehensive Governance, Security and Compliance (GRC) capabilities.