cloud management
Weather Warning
When it comes to cloud management, Ann Maya, marketing director at Quest Software, explains how
it should be done and that when you get it right, there shouldn’t be a (proverbial) cloud in sight.
D
riven by the challenges of
the always-on economy,
enterprises must adopt
the right tools to enable
their increasingly mobile
and flexible workforces. More
often than not, this means
supplying them with easy-to-
use applications that can access
corporate resources and data –
sometimes, valuable or sensitive
data – and in volumes that were
previously unthinkable.
The need to stay competitive
in the digital era has led to a mass
migration of enterprises to cloud-
hosted productivity platforms,
where there are considerable cost
savings and practical advantages
38 | September 2017
in handling fast, dynamic and data
intensive workloads.
However, transitioning to
these cloud platforms brings
with it its own set of challenges
and managers often overlook the
potential pitfalls. So, what can
organisations do to successfully
transition and manage data in a
cloud environment, and avoid any
firefighting issues in the future?
First steps
In a cloud world, your users are
your network. What they can see
and do dictates how they work,
and therefore organisations must
ensure the data they handle and
generate is safe. Any business
contemplating a transition to the
cloud will need to consider what
data will be managed, who owns
it and who has permission to
access it.
Determining which
applications are the most data
intensive and where hot data
will be placed so it can be readily
accessed, analysed and stored, will
be critical. In light of the upcoming
GDPR legislation, organisations
must put into place data
governance and security policies
as well as a contingency plan in the
event of any system downtime.
If issues are not adequately
addressed, valuable time may be