The IT aspect of your business is likely undergoing rapid transformation as you adopt more cloud solutions and expand your hybrid multicloud environment to accommodate a greater volume of applications. Gartner predicts that over half of all IT spending in key market segments will transition to the public cloud by 2025, illustrating the need for you to invest in cloud health if you intend for your business to keep pace with industry trends.
Let us guide you through the initial steps toward assessing and improving the health of your cloud infrastructure and learn more about the Nutanix tools that can simplify the process for your IT teams.
Key Takeaways:
- Monitoring is a key component in the process of assessing infrastructure health, so you must ensure your current practices grant the necessary visibility and control.
- The assessment process entails monitoring metrics such as visibility, optimization, and governance to gauge health.
- Decision-makers in the Nutanix environment can respond to the assessment results by engaging with a simple self-service interface that facilitates seamless remediation.
What is cloud health?
Cloud health refers to the quality of security and management of a cloud environment, whether comprised of a single cloud, multiple clouds, or a hybrid multicloud model. It is also possible to draw a parallel between the health of an infrastructure and its readiness to move or migrate to a cloud.
Gauging the health of your cloud is a matter of evaluating three key metrics:
- Cost management: The spending, return on investment (ROI), and total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with the cloud operating model
- Operational efficacy: The level of optimization, efficiency, and business integration present in cloud operations
- Security and compliance: The degree to which risks and vulnerabilities are visible in the cloud environment, as well as the quality of remediation that occurs when risks are present
An ideal solution for assessing and improving cloud health enables enterprise leaders and other end users to analyze, optimize, and maintain governance from a single control plane. The customer experience should be simple and intuitive, with access to professional support services or easy-to-use self-service options.
When the infrastructure is healthy, public cloud users can expect complete insight into cloud spending and resource optimization measures. Responding appropriately to health issues that arise can result in lower cloud expenditures and increased productivity, but this requires taking the right steps toward adopting a health assessment and improvement process.
Review your current monitoring practices
Monitoring is the foundational principle of assessing cloud health. Cloud monitoring in its most efficient form is an automated process that provides administrators with insight into data flows, potential breaches, overall performance and other metrics.
When you deploy a cloud in your infrastructure environment, you have the option of using bundled monitoring tools offered by the cloud provider or third-party software-as-a-service tools. These options are generally similar in practice, aiming to scan for errors that might threaten cybersecurity or business agility.
Users in the Nutanix environment already have built-in monitoring solutions available to them. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure includes comprehensive cloud management tools that detect vulnerabilities or inefficiencies and automates optimization with no need for additional configuration.
Your monitoring practices should give you a clear idea of how your business is faring based on the key cloud health metrics of costs, operations, and security. Poor visibility or lack of control may illustrate a need to migrate to a platform such as Nutanix that empowers you to accurately assess infrastructure health.
Conduct cloud health-specific monitoring
A comprehensive infrastructure platform should allow users insight into every facet of the business, from spending to application deployment and post-release upkeep as well as everything in between. Every metric measured can contribute to business decision-making, but accurately gauging health requires an approach focused on specific cloud-related factors.
Visibility of the cloud environment in terms of costs, spending trends, and security vulnerabilities is a core factor of cloud health. Assess visibility even across a multicloud ecosystem by monitoring spend, usage, and security logs.
Optimization is another measurement of health pertaining to costs and security as well as configurations. If certain teams or processes are compromising on efficiency or productivity to achieve goals, then these metrics will reveal that your system’s health is suffering from poor optimization.
Finally, monitoring security policies and potential drift points at which processes deviate from those policies will allow you to assess how effective your cloud environment is in terms of maintaining compliance through governance and achieving remediation through automation.
Respond to cloud health findings
With strong infrastructure monitoring tools and practices in place, you can gauge your cloud health by conducting specific monitoring of relevant metrics and processes. This entails compiling reports of metrics over several days or weeks, as well as viewing historical data and future projections.
The result of a comprehensive health analysis across all clouds in a multicloud environment is full visibility of spending, pain points, and bottlenecks that hinder the company and affect the overall performance of the entire pipeline.
Business leaders and IT decision-makers can use this insight to make informed choices on how to streamline processes, reallocate resources, and optimize cloud-based practices for better infrastructure health.
The ideal solution for responding to negative cloud health findings is not always clear, however. That is just one reason why it is important to operate on a cloud platform from a vendor that supports the business goals of individual consumers.
Guarantee positive and consistent cloud health with Nutanix
Even if you are undergoing a turbulent business transformation, you need a solution that instills you with the confidence to guarantee your customers that your cloud is a healthy platform for provisioning applications. Nutanix strives to give you that confidence with infrastructure that satisfies your monitoring and assessment needs via a simplified interface.
The Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an elegant solution with self-service options for assessing health metrics. With NCM as your unified hybrid multicloud control pane, you can:
- Create cloud consumption reports
- Generate budget alerts for cost control
- Manage cloud spend proactively with automated purchase detection
- Gain asset visibility across multiple clouds through holistic monitoring
- Enjoy peace of mind due to remediation solutions and hundreds of seamless cloud auditing processes
Accomplishing business goals can often conflict with the need to maintain positive cloud health. Equipped with the right tools for assessing and improving infrastructure conditions, however, you can deploy data and apps anywhere while maintaining certainty in your decisions.
Learn more about the self-service capabilities of Nutanix Cloud Manager and how you can further improve cloud health through HCI savings.
The Nutanix “how-to” info blog series is intended to educate and inform Nutanix users and anyone looking to expand their knowledge of cloud infrastructure and related topics. This series focuses on key topics, issues, and technologies around enterprise cloud, cloud security, infrastructure migration, virtualization, Kubernetes, etc. For information on specific Nutanix products and features, visit here.
© 2023 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. For additional legal information, please go here.