Analysts estimate that 80% of organizations will overshoot their cloud budgets.
Microsoft Azure is a modern, agile, scalable cloud infrastructure platform, but effective cloud management requires visibility across Azure and expertise to understand and manage day-to-day operations.
Effective Azure management demands Azure-specific experience, skills, resources, and tools. Businesses that lack these management essentials often fail to take advantage of the performance, cost, availability, and security benefits of their cloud infrastructure.
Learn more below about the challenges and requirements for effective Azure management.
Related Products and Services
- Azure Snapshot
No cost, self-serve Azure health check - Azure Optimization Assessment
Detailed assessment with prioritized optimization recommendations - Azure Monitoring & Management
Comprehensive Azure infrastructure management service with continuous cost optimization - Implement and Maintain Services
Professional analysis and implementation of AOA recommendations
Non-Transferable Skill Sets
Azure replaces on-premises infrastructure, but assumptions and strategies learned on-premises are not always directly applicable to Azure’s environment, tooling, and best practices. It can be challenging to find the time, in-depth platform knowledge, and specialist skills required to properly manage and optimize cloud infrastructure. Consequently, businesses may overspend, suffer the disruption of downtime and poor performance, and risk security breaches and data loss.
Limited Time and Expertise
Technical resources should be focused on building outstanding products and services for its customers. Cloud infrastructure serves that goal, but cloud management is often a second thought and rarely a core competency, so it’s often under-staffed and under-resourced. Often organizations attempt to crowd-source Azure ops from tech resources (i.e., developers) , distracting them from their core responsibilities. The result is sub-optimized, inefficient, and unsecure cloud deployments that cost more and hurt both performance and operations. .
Evolving Cloud Technology
Azure evolves as Microsoft enhances cloud services and adds new ones, but many cloud ops teams are either unaware of or don’t have the time, expertise, or resources to leverage new features. It is not unusual for Microsoft to announce several dozen upgrades per month in response to user requirements and advancing technology. Businesses that don’t take advantage of platform evolution miss opportunities to improve security and optimize cloud productivity, automation, and spending.
Security
Misconfiguration and misuse of cloud resources are the root cause of many security breaches and data leaks. Azure includes tools for improving, monitoring, and managing security, but Azure’s security model and tooling can be challenging to implement for businesses more familiar with on-premises infrastructure..
Immature Tooling
Microsoft Azure offers a rich array of cloud services for monitoring and DevOps management. However, recreating the integrations and visibility that can be achieved on premise is still a challenge. Out-of-the-box integrations across services, end-to-end visibility and solutions for incident alerting and management are required for effective cloud management but are not as easy to deploy and are less robust than on-premise solutions like System Center Operations Manager.
