Cloud Computing Management
It is the responsibility of cloud provider to manage resources and their performance. Management of resources includes several aspects of cloud computing such as load balancing, performance, storage, backups, capacity, deployment, etc. The management is essential to access full functionality of resources in the cloud.
Cloud Management Tasks
The cloud provider performs a number of tasks to ensure efficient use of cloud resources. Here, we will discuss some of them:
Audit System Backups
It is required to audit the backups timely to ensure restoring of randomly selected files of different users. Backups can be performed in following ways:
Backing up files by the company, from on-site computers to the disks that reside within the cloud.
Backing up files by the cloud provider.
It is necessary to know if cloud provider has encrypted the data, who has access to that data and if the backup is taken at different locations then the user must know the details of those locations.
Data Flow of the System
The managers are responsible to develop a diagram describing a detailed process flow. This process flow describes the movement of data belonging to an organization throughout the cloud solution.
Vendor Lock-In Awareness and Solutions
The managers must know the procedure to exit from services of a particular cloud provider. The procedures must be defined to enable the cloud managers to export data of an organization from their system to another cloud provider.
Knowing Provider’s Security Procedures
The managers should know the security plans of the provider for the following services:
- Multitenant use
- E-commerce processing
- Employee screening
- Encryption policy
Monitoring Capacity Planning and Scaling Capabilities
The managers must know the capacity planning in order to ensure whether the cloud provider is meeting the future capacity requirement for his business or not.
The managers must manage the scaling capabilities in order to ensure services can be scaled up or down as per the user need.
Monitor Audit Log Use
In order to identify errors in the system, managers must audit the logs on a regular basis.
Solution Testing and Validation
When the cloud provider offers a solution, it is essential to test it in order to ensure that it gives the correct result and it is error-free. This is necessary for a system to be robust and reliable.
