Optimizing cloud services can be challenging, especially when you don’t know how to measure the quality of a given workload’s deployment. Maybe you’ve deployed workloads to the cloud but you’re still not sure if you’re getting an actual return on your investment. Are you proactively managing your company’s data security, threat protection and account monitoring in the cloud? Do you have adequate security in place to protect against a data breach, and do you have monitoring in place to know if a data breach occurs? Are you in need a cloud solution provider to help with cost management, visibility into your vulnerabilities and adoption of best practices?

Here’s a quick checklist to make sure you’re getting the most value from your cloud operations:
 

Security

 Do you have identity and access management designed and implemented?
 Do you have security enabled throughout the cloud platform?
 Is your data in transit and at rest protected with encryption?
 Do you have visibility into your security monitoring and alerting?
 Have you automated your security responses based on industry best practices?
 

Reliability

 Is your on-prem and cloud infrastructure purposefully designed with resiliency in mind to protect against disasters? Can you recover effectively if there is a disaster?
 Are your applications designed and implemented to be highly available and resistant to failures? Can you identify your single points of failure?
 Do you regularly test for application security vulnerabilities and business continuity risks and address deficiencies in each area?
 

Performance Efficiency

 Are you continuously reviewing the appropriateness of your compute, storage, and network resources?
 Are you leveraging cloud native technologies to provide on-demand scalability?
 Are you proactively monitoring your environment for challenges and issues?
 Does your system automatically scale with user and application demand?
 

Operational Excellence

 Are you leveraging modern DevOps principles for application development and workload deployment?
 Are you benefitting from provisioning your infrastructure using automation such as Infrastructure as code (IaC)?
 Does your cloud solution provider give proactive and reactive support as issues arise? Can you escalate issues and questions?
 Have you established preventive maintenance procedures and reporting?
 Can you assess your progress on your cloud journey?
 

Cost Optimization

 Are you appropriately provisioning your cloud spend? Have you over-estimated or under-estimated?
 How are you right sizing your cloud environment?
 Are you allocating costs across the organization to the appropriate department?

Did you find that your answers to the above questions were less than satisfactory? Were there questions that you were unable to answer? If so, BDO Digital can help you properly modernize and manage your data estate. A trusted advisor can help you drive innovation, right-size your needs and help you leverage the scalability, reliability and security of cloud solutions.

BDO Digital is a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP) and can help you assess your cloud and management strategy to make sure it’s right for your company. Fill out the below Cloud Acceleration Assessment to speak to a BDO Digital consultant.