Forem: Nishant Sharma

How to leverage FinOps with Managed Services to Survive a Recession

Nishant Sharma — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 10:32:46 +0000

Companies thought migrating to the cloud would give them a competitive edge over others. It appears lucrative because of a promise of low operating costs and higher efficiency. While Cloud technology has unlimited potential, many organizations fail to realize the benefits.

An increasing number of organizations found out that migrating to the cloud and maintaining its infrastructure is among their top operating costs. They also face visibility issues as they cannot determine where their cloud budget is going.

And when there is an imminent recession likely to hit the global economy, organizations first think about cutting down their unnecessary costs. As the cloud becomes a costly overhead, how will the companies manage their clouds in an obvious economic downturn?

Companies can no longer survive without implementing cloud technology. Complex e-commerce platforms, remote sales opportunities, increasing demand of buyers, and managing employees worldwide all have intensified the need for clouds. The agility and flexibility that this technology offers have opened new ways of doing business that cannot be ignored.

But, how to make the cloud initiative pay?

That is where the FinOps comes in.

As per the 2022 cloud Infrastructure report, many organizations believe that FinOps is an essential practice, however, only a few have implemented one. 96% of the enterprise respondents believe that FinOps is important for their organization’s cloud strategy, however only 10% practice a mature FinOps structure in place.

What is FinOps?

FinOps is an abbreviation for Cloud Financial Operations. It combines culture, organization, and data to help organizations to optimize their cloud expenditure. Many Managed Service Providers (MSPs) already provide cloud cost optimization services. They can guide you about where you can cut costs. But until you have a holistic picture of the sources of cloud waste, it becomes difficult to control costs.

FinOps give a cloud spend model where you will get a complete picture of the expenditure and usage across all clouds. It becomes much easier to remove sources of waste and drive in better business outcomes. So, MSPs must start offering their customer FinOps services to thrive in the recession.

How FinOps can help?

At the time of economic downturn, enterprises need to justify every expense. They must be strategic with the business value they can generate with their spending. They need to consider everything like expenses, speed of delivery, competitive advantage, and value generated. All of these are provided by FinOps.

Since FinOps need unique skills and strategic expertise, companies must look for external parties to do the job. Thus, it is an ideal program that MSPs must include in their portfolios.

Here are some of the potential benefits of FinOps that can help you to truly see the results:

1. Cost control and savings

Cloud fiscal management along with managed services are designed to deliver maximum rewards to the cloud users and control costs across all the departments. Cost optimization in the cloud is a challenging aspect for many organizations. The cloud bills are technical and complex to make out overhead cloud spending.

FinOps mainly solve two significant problems that make cloud cost optimization difficult. These are:

• A deep cost and performance analysis

• Clear metrics

Both of these give an insight into the cloud usage expenditure, identify the valuable services and help select the areas where optimization is possible

2. Reinvest savings for development and faster delivery

With FinOps it becomes easier to identify the areas of cloud waste and propose a customized cost optimization solution. But, implementing it remains a challenge. It is only possible if the engineering, business, and finance teams collaborate and take responsibility for their cloud usage. They must agree on a data-driven cloud expense approach.

Companies can derive the following benefits:

• Reduce waste and start generating revenues

• Invest revenue yield for research and innovation purposes

• Bring in new features utilizing cloud speed

• Raise the user satisfaction

3. Visibility of performance

Each managed service provider gives their clients their cloud consumption data, insights, and bills. But it fails to recognize exactly who is spending how much, where, and why in your total cloud infrastructure.

In an organization developers and engineers are usually the main users of cloud resources. If they have full visibility of their expenditure along with proper planning from where they can cut waste, it is possible to control cloud spending.

4. Predict future consumption and costs

The finance team is responsible for budgeting and forecasting. But cloud spending is not fixed. The engineers, developers, and finance teams must work together to predict the future cloud consumption model keeping in mind all the possibilities like the introduction of new features, the addition of a database, future workload, disasters, and other variable factors.

FinOps based on past data and the overall possibilities of cloud expenses helps in developing an accurate cloud forecasting model that gives an understanding of how much budget you need to allocate for the cloud.

We have compiled FinOps Best Practices and AWS Tools for Cost-Effective Cloud Management

Many companies across different industries have successfully implemented public cloud and are achieving impressive results. The companies followed a few basic rules. They have worked with managed service providers to install a well-planned cloud operating model. They have adopted FinOps to channelize their cloud expenses properly. All the organizational departments have worked together to maximize the cloud opportunity.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

Putting the Best Foot Forward to get Cloud Migration Right – The Cloud Migration Assessment

Nishant Sharma — Mon, 15 May 2023 08:18:06 +0000

Globally, the cloud computing market will surpass $1 trillion by 2028. If you are about to become a part of this statistic, you want to set yourself up for agility, scalability, high availability, and costs savings with cloud migration.

While moving to the cloud helps you leverage technology for several benefits, migration is fraught with complexities and it must be carefully planned to take into consideration the existing infrastructure environment, complexities, and whether those workloads are architected to run the same way on Cloud. It is important to understand the estimated cost of migration, the ROI (Return on Investment) of running those workloads in the Cloud, and more importantly correctly making cost calculations with informed inputs.

Establishing a strong business case and setting migration goals lay the foundation for a successful migration. By success, we are not looking at a smooth technical shift alone, but long-term objectives including business goals, efficiency, cost optimization and growth. This is where a cloud assessment gains significance.

The Importance of the Cloud Migration Assessment

A cloud assessment is a deep dive evaluation of an organization’s cloud readiness based on best practices and needs in the context of the business. The assessment approaches migration taking into account stakeholders, workloads, existing IT infrastructure, processes, security and governance, resources, budget and cost estimates.

Know in detail the ways to prepare the organization for cloud migration

The assessment helps understand risks that will influence the design and methodology of the migration plan. If the readiness assessment is overlooked, migrating to the cloud can become more complex than anticipated.

5 Things the Cloud Assessment Helps You Achieve

1. Identity the best strategy

Before you migrate to the cloud, it is important to establish what your goals are. This includes capturing baseline metrics of your IT infrastructure so you can map workloads to assets and applications. A clear understanding of where you are starting from will help you set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your cloud migration, such as page load times, availability, responsive times, CPU usage, memory usage, and conversion rates.

Your migration strategy should be developed early on, with a focus on business objectives over technology. These metrics will help you measure success across several categories.

2. Choose what to migrate

Choosing what to migrate involves a serious consideration of the criticality of the application, production status, data requirements, business and technology considerations of the application, compliance requirements, dependencies and integrations.

Not all apps are best suited for the cloud. Some apps may perform better when migrated to a private or hybrid cloud instead of a public one. Others may only need minor tweaking while others may need more in-depth code changes. It is always best to do a full analysis of architecture, complexity, and implementation before beginning the migration process rather than after everything has been transferred over.

As you evaluate, do keep the following questions in your mind:

Which application requires re-design, and which will move as-is

If re-design is required, what would be the level of complexity

Can your cloud provider offer migration services without reconfiguring workloads

The ROI and time consumed for each application you will be moving

Choose a cloud environment – multi, private, or public cloud

Before choosing the environment, it is important to consider the cost and security implications for each

3. Preserve operational continuity and data integrity

Maintaining data integrity is crucial to any business, especially when migrating to the cloud. Data loss or corruption can cause significant downtime and negative publicity, so it is important to take measures to ensure that your data is unharmed. Operational continuity is also key to successful cloud migration. Downtime can be costly, so it is important to plan for a smooth transition to the cloud by ensuring that all critical systems are up and running before making the switch.

4. Audit your IT infrastructure & review performance

Conduct an audit of your IT infrastructure to assess your organization’s readiness for cloud migration. Analyze your applications in terms of usage and capabilities to determine which ones can be migrated to the cloud. Consider the adaptability of each app and how well it will fit into a cloud environment.

When reviewing your plans to port applications, data, and systems to the cloud, make sure that they can be rearchitected to meet customer expectations. This will help ensure that your transition is successful and that you continue to provide high-quality service.

Also read: Quick Guide to Migrate Microsoft SQL Database to AWS Cloud

5. Estimate Cloud Spend

Estimating cloud spend will help with budgeting and prioritizing applications to be migrated that would bring cost benefits on cloud. Evaluate direct costs which involve cost for hardware, licensing, servers and so on. Indirect costs are not directly associated with the hardware or technology and involve spend on resources, probable downtime, training, operational expenses etc. Depending on the type of migration, refactoring costs might apply. The cost of the cloud environment on a monthly basis along with the spend for services, cloud storage and the cloud vendor (if applicable) are estimated.

Accomplish a Successful Cloud Migration with Umbrella Infocare

Planning, implementing, and concluding a successful cloud migration is no easy feat. However, choosing to dedicate the proper time and resources necessary is not without reward. Successful cloud migration can provide your organization with additional security, flexibility, modernization, and cost savings.

At Umbrella Infocare, we help organizations with their cloud initiatives by providing digital transformation solutions that enable businesses to optimize AWS cloud and data analytics for growth and innovation. Our team of experts works with organizations of all sizes to help them strategize and migrate applications and data to the cloud quickly and securely, and to leverage Cloud Migration, Managed Services, DevOps, Data and Analytics, Cloud Security and Cloud Native Applications for achieving business outcomes.

Learn more about the Umbrella Infocare Cloud Migration Assessment.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

How to leverage FinOps with Managed Services to Survive a Recession

Nishant Sharma — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 06:20:48 +0000

But, how to make the cloud initiative pay?

That is where the FinOps comes in.

What is FinOps?

How FinOps can help?

Since FinOps need unique skills and strategic expertise, companies must look for external parties to do the job. Thus, it is an ideal program that MSPs must include in their portfolios.

Here are some of the potential benefits of FinOps that can help you to truly see the results:

1. Cost control and savings

FinOps mainly solve two significant problems that make cloud cost optimization difficult. These are:

• A deep cost and performance analysis

• Clear metrics

Both of these give an insight into the cloud usage expenditure, identify the valuable services and help select the areas where optimization is possible

2. Reinvest savings for development and faster delivery

Companies can derive the following benefits:

• Reduce waste and start generating revenues

• Invest revenue yield for research and innovation purposes

• Bring in new features utilizing cloud speed

• Raise the user satisfaction

3. Visibility of performance

4. Predict future consumption and costs

_We have compiled FinOps Best Practices and AWS Tools for Cost-Effective Cloud Management _

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

The Essential First Step in Cost Optimization for Cloud — The OLA

Nishant Sharma — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 09:28:53 +0000

You are ready to migrate to Amazon Web Services, or if you are already on AWS, are you having trouble optimizing for costs?

No matter which side of the fence you are on, the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) is a game changer. The OLA helps you reduce costs on third-party licensing costs by evaluating the on-premise and cloud environments; and optimize cloud for resource efficiency and costs.

How the OLA Helps AWS Optimization

The AWS OLA assessment is a free program that helps businesses on AWS and those planning to migrate to AWS evaluate the current IT environment for optimization. The evaluation considers three main aspects – third party licensing costs, resource utilization and application dependencies. The assessment enables businesses to arrive at the right licensing strategy for moving workloads to AWS.

Here are three reasons for leveraging the OLA Assessment:

1. Cost Optimization

Many companies on AWS or considering migration do not have the resources or bandwidth to conduct a full-fledged analysis of their costing and resources. Upon conducting the OLA assessment, most often businesses discover underutilization of servers and systems and the potential to save significantly on costs. Additionally, flexible options for optimizing resource usage on cloud can lead to further cost reductions.

2. Technology and expertise driven Assessment

The assessment mandates the use of industry leading tools that evaluate using a data and measurement-based strategy. Experts come with in-depth knowledge of Microsoft licensing agreements and AWS to come up with an objective approach that best suits business and IT needs.

3. Right sizing and Flexibility on AWS

The assessment not only helps identify gaps in resource utilization, but the results enable identifying optimal low-cost options suited to various workloads. Based on the assessment, one can determine the right instances and savings packages that are ideal for the business. OLA also leads businesses to choose from flexible licensing options including Bring Your Own License (BYOL), aligning cost with usage.

The AWS OLA Process – A glimpse into how it works

1. Discovery

The first step in the OLA process is to make a thorough discovery of all servers in the environment and determine which resources are to be migrated, retained on-premise, or retired. This helps accurately identify the workloads to be migrated and the scope.

2. Licensing Assessment

The Licensing Assessment helps you understand your current licensing usage and get recommendations on pricing options that are thoroughly evaluated to arrive at the most accurate cost estimate for migration. The program also helps identify certain licensing rules that can be leveraged while migrating to AWS.

3. Data Consolidation

The OLA provides options to assimilate data on your current deployment using purpose built tools. This step gives a clear picture of the storage, memory and compute on-premise, current usage and costs.

4. Migration Planning

The OLA helps plan migration with cost and resource optimization in mind. It provides a projection of various cloud scenarios based on utilization, license purchasing and other criteria. You can also understand the differences between migrating existing licenses as opposed to buying new licenses. Over provisioned on-premise resources can be rightsized on cloud to save on costs and the directional costing can help plan a research backed business case for migration.

Benefits of OLA

Helps save atleast 20% on licensing costs – BYOL or purchasing new licenses
Enables better utilization of servers – 80% of servers are underutilized
Custom cost models offer various cost options based on resource utilization

Raising the Migration Bar

With the OLA, businesses that are planning to migrate to AWS can optimize for costs, resources, efficiency and productivity. The OLA also helps companies on AWS streamline their environment for growth and cost efficiency. Leveraging the assessment brings businesses the competitive edge and harness the cloud confidently for best results.

As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Umbrella Infocare can help businesses optimize the OLA for best results.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

How DevSecOps Safeguards Your AWS Cloud Better?

Nishant Sharma — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 10:31:02 +0000

We are familiar with yet another buzzword in the IT sector- DevOps and its popular approach that placed cyber security on the qui vive by embedding the right tools into the software development life cycle. In the world of infrastructure-as-a-service, the cloud computing market in 2021 has ballooned to $250.04 billion. When it comes to canvassing the benefits of cloud security, the list is extensive. The top-level cloud computing security solutions provide businesses with advanced cybersecurity services and the availability and reliability to conduct their business in a global marketplace. It is an essential ingredient that grants multiple levels of control in network infrastructure, thus protecting the data. The most significant benefit of the cyber-security solution is that it safeguards the resources stored online from leakage, theft, or cloud data loss.

Why DevSecOps For AWS Cloud?

When it comes to AWS DevSecOps, Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows businesses to look out for security threats and vulnerabilities by bestowing them with the opportunity to integrate security tools that ensure application security and compliance. With AWS-enabled DevSecOps services, it has become easier for companies to arrest the vulnerabilities and risks to the software or application as soon as they encounter them. To adapt DevSecOps with AWS offerings, it is of utmost importance for you to implement it righteously. The key to the quick delivery and implementation, and overall success of the software, is the identification of risks at the initial stages of SDLC

Let us take a glance at the “Why’s” of securing AWS cloud with DevSecOps:

Testing: Key to A Successful Application
AWS has a broad spectrum with both in-house and third-party apps offering continuous testing for DevSecOps and open source scanning tools integrated with the pipeline for various purposes. With easy integration of testing tools, you can choose the best software development tools for your applications. Additionally, you can take advantage of security-finding aggregation services with the support of AWS. Finally, the employees win continuous testing services from AWS that keep the processes moving linearly across a pipeline.

Some of the prominent, continuous testing tools that you can integrate to meet your specific requirements are – Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) dependency check, SonarQube (SAST), PHPStan, and OWASP Zap.

Round-the-clock SDLCs Deliveries
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous development (CD) allow you to automate your software delivery processes. Leveraging an automated CI/CD pipeline for faster delivery opens doors for building security directly into the DevSecOps process. It further enables businesses to enjoy a quicker, secure delivery pipeline with negligible attacks and application downtime. The amalgamation of AWS with DevSecOps works with shared responsibility for secure code delivery. AWS for CI/CD offers services called CodePipeline that depict the exact meaning as its name- a pipeline for code. It not only builds and tests the code but also publishes it according to the instructions. CI/CD by AWS steps up the game by accelerating the development and deployment of the software.

For CI/CD, the following best AWS services can be used- AWS CodeBuild, AWS Code Commit, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodeLamba, and many more.

Top-Notch Monitoring Services
Monitoring is a crucial element for maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of all AWS solutions. Amazon CloudWatch by AWS is the perfect DevSecOps-specific version for logging and monitoring services. CloudWatch works like a dream for the entire premise of DevSecOps – security and monitoring. It monitors the AWS resources and the applications that run on it in real-time. Additionally, it provides data and metrics for applications and infrastructure systems. Companies can create customized dashboards, set notification alarms, or take actions when a specified metric reaches a threshold. Moreover, AWS DevSecOps monitoring offers the edge in multiple monitoring systems rather than individual ones that are siloed.

Two widely used AWS monitoring and logging services are AWS CloudWatch Logs and AWS CloudWatch Events.

Best-in-Class Auditing Services
The audit indicates the removal of undesirable users, roles, groups, policies and grants your users and software only the required permissions. AWS offers audit and governance services to provide DevSecOps with the opportunity to log, monitor, and access data across the AWS infrastructure. Companies can vanguard their overall user activity and monitoring with a simple governance tool at their fingertips. Further, automation of the auditing process ensures human error-free and completely secure recording and storage of data logs.

Best-in-class auditing and governance services include AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity, Access Management, and AWS Config

Leg-up with Software Operation Services
System Manager by AWS gives the Ops part of DevSecOps a boost by granting the operation teams the power to streamline operational procedures. It brings them under the same roof for a cohesive environment to enhance security and management.

System Manager designed for DevSecOps teams has made managing applications and bridging AWS cloud with legacy applications a child’s play. With the support of the System Manager, the team can plug into CI/CD processes, manage security risks, and integrate valuable infrastructure resources.

Following are the AWS software operations services- AWS Security Hub, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

What Are The Benefits Of DevSecOps?

When it comes to DevSecOps, speed and security are the two prime keywords that give it an edge. So let’s dig deeper into the benefits of embracing the future of DevOps!

Speedy and Economical Software Delivery
Fixing errors and security issues can be tedious and exorbitant. When software develops in a DevSecOps environment, its rapid and secure delivery saves time and reduces costs by omitting the need to repeat a process for addressing security issues. Better source management translates to cost-efficiency. Since integrated security cuts out duplicate reviews and unnecessary builds, the entire project results in more secure code.

Proactive Security For A Better Consumer Trust
Proactive security translates into better consumer trust. The intervention of Cybersecurity by DevSecOps starts from the initial stage of the development lifecycle, and throughout the process, the code is reviewed, scanned, audited, and scanned for security issues. As soon as these issues get identified, they are addressed and fixed before additional dependencies are born.

Automation with Modern Development
For organizations that use continuous integration or continuous delivery pipeline to transport their software, operation teams can integrate cybersecurity into an automated test suite. Automated testing ensures whether incorporated software dependencies are at befitting levels. Plus, it confirms that software passes security unit testing. However, it can test and secure code with static and dynamic analysis, and its automation depends on the project and organizational goals.

Adaptive and Scalable Process
Adaptability translates to scalability for organizations! Automation containers are adaptable to the changing, developing environment. DevSecOps lends itself to a repeatable and adaptable process. As the environment changes and adapts to the new requirements, it ensures that security is applied consistently. The entire cycle can be made scalable without compromising on efficiency with the righteous implementation of DevSecOps.

Embracing The Future Of DevOps

The world is shifting to digital with a need to adopt secure cloud infrastructure. Organizations are embracing DevOps as the choicest means for project development. Thanks to the end-to-end security implementation that has led numerous organizations to adopt DevSecOps. The automation added to the process is a time-saver with better security, which makes DevSecOps the king with no barriers.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog  

Managed Services for Banking and Financial Services businesses

Nishant Sharma — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 08:45:37 +0000

For businesses in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector, competition is stiffer than ever, customer expectations are constantly on the rise, and compliances are evolving and complex.  

Technology holds the answers to each of these challenges, and more specifically, with managed services, a load of building an internal team is taken out of your hands while an experienced and specialized partner assures technical expertise. A managed service is like a concierge for your enterprise, taking you forward on the path to the promised land of ‘everything-as-a-service.’ And enabling you, as a BFSI business, to focus on your business’s core competencies. 

Why businesses must rely on cloud managed services 

Migrating business applications and IT systems to the cloud helps to streamline business operations while simplifying the management of key business applications. Businesses get a competitive edge for faster growth through increased customer engagement and agile operations by leveraging the flexible and scalable cloud infrastructure. Adding value to businesses in the long term is one of the main benefits of cloud migration. 

Comprehensive cloud management is critical for businesses to maximize the benefits of their cloud operations that have high-risk exposure because of security threats and data loss that can disrupt business continuity. Therefore, regardless of the type of cloud environment, a hybrid or multi-tenant environment, it is essential to entrust the job of cloud management to some reliable Managed Service Provider with extensive knowledge and experience of the ecosystem.  

Fully managed Cloud services ensure uninterrupted availability and comprehensive security of the cloud environment. Consequently, businesses can confidently explore and utilize the capabilities of the cloud infrastructure for improved performance and better results while maximizing their core business competencies. 

Higher security, better compliance
 
To sustain the tremendous growth of the past few years, businesses in the BFSI sector must enhance their data handling to manage big data with support from some Managed Service Provider (MSP) that takes care of the Cloud operations. As the BFSI sector handles enormous data volumes that are extremely sensitive in nature, compliance, and security of the systems are paramount. With large-scale Cloud adoption, the security threats are constantly increasing and the aspects of compliance with the regulatory standards are becoming more challenging, especially for cross-border transactions.

The shared responsibility model for ensuring Cloud security works very well. MSPs take full responsibility for securing hardware and infrastructure across the business landscape covering regions, zones, and locations. Moreover, they also secure computing, databases, storage, and networking software. On the other hand, users are responsible for the security of their platform applications, operating systems, customer data, network, and workloads. 

Cloud monitoring too is important because it ensures complete cooperation between all IT systems and the Cloud, which helps organizations to operate with high efficiency as all parts of the system work in harmony to ensure high performance.  Continuous surveillance of the Cloud connected services and other digital assets help identify potential vulnerabilities early and bolster security before they can cause any damage. 

Companies in the BFSI sector must comply with various regulatory requirements. Since the design of Cloud infrastructure has regulatory aspects built into it, compliance becomes easy for Cloud users. 

Know more about Cloud Security measures for Financial Services, and how AWS goes beyond 

Cost optimization

While it has become common practice for many BFSI businesses to migrate to cloud, it does not always follow that they are able to save on costs upon migration. They end up facing a huge cloud spend with increasing costs for innovating, improving performance and agility. Cost optimization comes with a deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, resources used on cloud, identifying the right pricing model, right sizing of applications, optimizing storage and so on.

Monitoring resource utilization, selecting the right services that are appropriate for the business, leveraging discounts and offers, setting up auto scaling and helping to keep track of costs with dashboards and visualization are also critical aspects that require cloud expertise. Cost optimization includes improving efficiency by disabling resources when they are not in use, or removing unused resources, evaluating workload efficiency by comparing costs and output, and continuously identifying spend and saving opportunities.

To summarize, cost optimization helps estimate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to evaluate the sustainability of the migration over a period of time. Find out more about optimizing for costs and governance.

Getting the best out of automation

One of the key benefits of cloud, as we all know, is automation. Automation helps build, test and deploy faster, ensures compliance and security, and high-quality delivery. Automation enables redundancy, fast paced changes, duplication of environments and elasticity.

However, getting the best out of automation necessitates creating a framework that favors automation, and one that adheres to best practices. When you get it right, automation gives control over resource usage, helps manage infrastructure more efficiently, and provides power where it is most needed while enabling cost and time savings.

To optimize automation, one requires knowledge of templates, Infrastructure as Code (IaaS), security best practices and governance. It is important to establish a control environment built on best practices that are framed from compliance objectives, validations, and verifications. Availing Managed Services for automation can help gain control over enterprise applications on cloud and to find the right balance between centrally managing cloud and decentralizing where needed.

Well-Architected Review

You are on cloud and whether you are benefiting from it or not, have you thought about understanding how you can improve and get better control over costs and security? This is where a Well Architected Review (WAR) gains significance; it helps you review the health and state of your architecture in terms of best practices, design principles and industry best practices. WAR consists of five pillars that include operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. The assessment helps businesses understand where they stand in terms of these five pillars and to identify remediation steps.

WAR is most effective in addressing growing concerns in performance, costs and security and offers a well-defined approach to enhance cloud infrastructure. Implementing WAR helps identify gaps in the cloud infrastructure and recommends remediation aimed at optimization. This can enable right sizing of resources, gaining control over spiraling costs, bringing flexibility and ensuring continuous compliance and security.

Conclusion
 
Banking and Financial services businesses must explore the Cloud to the fullest for faster business growth, ensuring business continuity and governance and compliance. Managed Service Providers can help achieve these goals of using Cloud technology for business gains effectively and help BFSI companies save on costs, enable security and innovation.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog  

5 Benefits of Modernizing on AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud

Nishant Sharma — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:23:28 +0000

Adoption of Cloud technology for adding value to businesses gathered tremendous pace during the Covid19 pandemic that became a trendsetter. However, Cloud migration is no longer a unique move but a necessity for organizations to survive and grow in the fast-changing business landscape driven by the adoption of newer and better technologies. Organizations that moved their IT systems to the Cloud could add the desired value to their businesses. But now it is time to do more with the Cloud to derive better value from it for modernizing with cloud technology to meet the competition and to ensure business and customer success, moving the legacy systems to Cloud has provided the expected returns, and organizations must now look beyond the migration process and focus on Modernization with Migration, a process also known as Re-Architect. It is time for organizations to shift their focus to applications to usher in the modernization phase of Cloud migration.

Besides ensuring seamless service to customers, organizations derive numerous benefits of modernizing on AWS Cloud which bolsters operations and fosters growth.

Let us consider the top five:

1. Reaping the benefits of FinOps in AWS to drive growth

Facing problems with mismanaged Cloud estates is common among business owners. Analyzing your cloud price structure and cloud performance can be a tedious task. Moreover, properly understanding the manner of Cloud operations every month and Allocating and managing Cloud spend can be highly challenging. Optimizing Cloud costs are an ongoing process and need good collaboration between IT and Finance departments. The Cloud FinOps architecture helps to drive financial accountability by unifying technology, finance, and business for speeding up the process of business value realization through Cloud transformation. The Cloud computing model comprises serverless workloads that manage the allocation of machine resources dynamically and help reduce TCO or Total Cost of Ownership. Since clients must pay the actual amount of resources consumed for any application, the serverless services cost a fraction of dedicated servers and save at least 80% of the co-drive financial accountability by unifying technology, finance, and business to speed up the business value realization process.

Here is a blog on FinOps Best Practices and AWS Tools for Cost-Effective Cloud Management

2.Migrating Windows workloads to Linux on AWS

AWS provides several options to shift Windows workloads to Linux. The unprecedented costs, agility, and scale advantages make AWS the most preferred Cloud service to support modernization goals. Additionally, the unprecedented agility of the platform ensures that customers benefit from greater reliability and higher performance and explore increased and rapid innovation.

AWS offers an array of options for modernizing organizations by shifting from Windows to Linux or moving off mainframes or embracing non-relational databases and many more. AWS ensures complete freedom for customers to use the services according to the organizational requirements by availing themselves of the ‘pay as you use’ model that does away with any kind of licensing need.

Through constant innovation and enhanced performance for more than a decade, AWS not only helps to move workloads to the Cloud but also encourages changing nature of those workloads. By extending support for open source software, AWS ensures that customers can speedily access features and capabilities of modern data technologies, which is mostly open source.

3. Modernizing applications with AWS gives a clear edge to businesses

Until 2019, the modernization of businesses had been happening steadily to match the rate of growth of e-commerce and other online businesses. But the Covid19 pandemic accelerated the pace of modernization, especially for e-commerce companies. The pandemic triggered such a huge spike in demand for online supplies that companies had no option but to shift to top gear for modernization to cope with unprecedented demand and ensure high growth.

For example, an online grocery store that used to record 30-40% annual growth recorded 6 times more traffic daily during the pandemic. To capitalize on the incredible growth prospects, the company that was already using AWS and had been breaking the monolithic structure gradually by creating containers for workload isolation had to speed up the pending modernization tasks by advancing deadlines from years to a few months. By completing all tasks of containerization and having 60 microservices by mid-2020, the company could successfully capitalize on the growth opportunities ahead of the competitors. It is a glaring example of how modernizing applications with AWS gives a clear edge to businesses.

4. Database modernization with AWS
To stay ahead of the curve, businesses are focusing on the successful implementation of analytics and machine learning into business processes. To achieve this goal, organizations must take their siloed data and aggregate all data into one location. To maximize the gains from data aggregation, organizations must make the best use of the modern data architecture of AWS that allows moving data effortlessly between purpose-built data stores and data lakes.

Moving the databases to the cloud frees up your teams to add more value and reduces the operational costs as well. Rather than spending time patching, scaling, and securing databases, teams can easily focus on innovating.

5. SAP modernization with AWS
Organizations are turning to AWS cloud native technologies to modernize their SAP legacy applications. Whether the objective is to reduce costs, adopt the RISE with SAP offering or migrate to SAP S/ 4 HANA, AWS offers proven techniques coupled with unmatched experience in offering Cloud support to SAP customers.

Know how running SAP HANA on AWS makes a difference! Read here!

AWS provides a resilient infrastructure across the globe to run SAP applications exclusively. Whether you want to overhaul your entire SAP infrastructure or modernize only some selected portions, you will always find a template solution in AWS that eliminates Single Point of Failure. The interconnectivity of the global AWS infrastructure ensures low latency but higher speeds. Moreover, the platform allows data storage and management in compliance with laws related to data regulation including GDPR.

Most importantly, the top-of-the-line security features of AWS come in handy in the modernization efforts of organizations that achieve speedy growth with the option of seamless scalability.

Having said that!

While we understand that making the switch to AWS can feel like a daunting task, it needs to be done to stay ahead of the competition. Not making the switch would be a mistake as AWS has become the industry standard for cloud computing. Sure, other modernization approaches come with their own benefits – but they’re often costly, complex, and challenging to implement. A more efficient option would be partnering with Umbrella Infocare, we offer an array of Cloud Services to securely transform and innovate modern-day businesses, digitally.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

Best Practices and AWS Tools for Cost-Effective Cloud Management

Nishant Sharma — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 04:39:15 +0000

With the cloud becoming ubiquitous in businesses across geographies, sizes, and industries, many organizations are also quickly discovering that optimizing the cost of cloud infrastructure is easier said than done.

Rapidly rising costs, bloated over-provisioned infra, and a lack of ownership of cloud expenses among IT teams are increasingly common issues. The answer to these challenges is FinOps.

What is FinOps?

As defined by the FinOps Foundation, FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.

Just as DevOps brings development and IP operations teams together, FinOps breaks down barriers and eliminates silos on the financial side of IT operations. It brings together finance, development, IT operations, product management, and other associated teams to streamline the management of cloud costs.

How do you get FinOps right?

FinOps is about organizational culture – it brings together all the stakeholders in cloud cost management to enable informed and holistically considered decision-making, optimize organization-wide cloud infrastructure capacity, remove infra blockers to technology initiatives, and of course, minimize overall cloud spend for a given requirement.

We would strongly recommend reading the FinOps Principles detailed by the FinOps Foundation as a starting point to a successful FinOps practice.

And to give you a little more of a boost, here is a list of FinOps best practices that go a long way toward achieving your FinOps goals.

Get the whole team to buy-in to the initiative – without all participants on board, the benefits of FinOps tend to fall short of potential.
Run an in-depth assessment of the resource requirements of all your applications across platforms using techniques like resource tagging.
Map costs to business metrics to establish a reliable method of assessment. Define KPIs and benchmark your performance against peers.
Monitor and optimize the size of your cloud infrastructure to closely match your actual requirements, and also optimize resource utilization.
Reduce costs by committing to reserved instances and other cost-saving offerings in advance, based on careful analysis of resource usage.
Make sure your applications are built for the cloud, to give you the ability to scale resources up or down based on traffic.
Harden the FinOps practice into your organization’s culture with clear and consistent communication, and regular reviews to keep the optimizing process active.

FinOps and AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s leading public cloud provider, and so if you plan to implement FinOps in your organization, chances are that cloud financial management (CFM) for AWS will be a significant part of the practice.

While all the principles of FinOps and the best practices listed above hold true for AWS as well as other cloud providers, here are some AWS-specific tools and services that will help you on your journey.

AWS Cost Explorer, and the even more detailed AWS Cost & Usage Reports, help you track and visualize your AWS resource usage and costs across products and over time.
AWS Compute Optimizer helps you choose the optimal AWS resources through analysis of the resource utilization of your workload and AWS’ own extensive experience.
AWS Savings Plans offer considerable cost savings (as high as 72%) in return for longer-term committed use of compute capacity.
AWS Well-Architected Framework includes a Cost Optimization pillar to educate and guide customers on best practices for design, delivery, and maintenance.
AWS Cost Management enables accurate budget planning by predicting likely costs and recommending ways you can lower costs through optimization of pricing.

At Umbrella, our capabilities in delivering DevOps as a Service as well as AWS Cost Optimization services dovetail into helping you set up and run a successful FinOps practice. Talk to us to see how we can help you take the next step on your cloud optimization journey.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

How to Measure Success in DevOps?

Nishant Sharma — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 05:18:19 +0000

Any organization that wants a DevOps transformation will require significant investment in terms of money, time, and resources. This process will necessitate the overhaul of everything, including communication and training tools. The ability to set and assess performance benchmarks helps define the objective, increase efficiency, and improve productivity to track success.

A DevOps initiative aims to improve communication and collaboration between the development and operation teams in the organization. The requirement is to facilitate faster delivery of software and, in the process, reduce outages, downtime, and any issues that can impact end-user experience negatively.

Addressing specific challenges and the needs of an organization requires monitoring via key metrics. The KPIs for DevOps should be such that it provides complete details of the impact on the business value of a DevOps success.

7 Aspects to Measure Success in DevOps

A DevOps implementation can only be justified if there are appropriate and measurable metrics that can guide technology in a production-related decision.

Key metrics should have a well-defined set of goals at the beginning. Stakeholders in a business should agree at the start on the outcomes of the business return on investment. This will then lay down the path for prioritizing the DevOps process KPIs.

The following aspects need to be considered to evaluate performance metrics that have the maximum impact on the development and growth of a business.

1. Deployment Frequency

The software requires regular updates, new features, and upgrades for better accuracy and efficiency for building and maintaining advantages over competitors—users changing need a more agile and faster system.

Deployment frequency measurement on a weekly or daily basis provides better insight into which updates were beneficial and which areas still needed improvement. Deployment frequency is a critical metric that helps steady and sustainable development and growth.

2. Change Failure Rate

DevOps is a complex subject, and no single metric can measure its success or failure. Deployment frequency is an example where increasing the frequency helps for greater agility, but they must also be seen in conjunction with failure rates. It is also seen that frequent changes that are deployed fail often, then there is a risk of loss of customer satisfaction and revenue.

If the key performance indicator suggests a high change failure rate after deployment frequency increases. Then it means scaling it back and working on long-term solutions.

3. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is an important performance indicator that measures a company’s efficiency in resolving issues. MTTR measures the average time taken to recover from failure to resolution. It evaluates the impact on the business, the repercussion on customer experience, and understanding and prioritizing the problem.

MTTR provides insights into whether the customer experienced an error, lost access, or abandoned the application. Improving MTTR helps reduce the problem’s impact and cost and maintains customer satisfaction.

4. Lead Time

This is the average time measured for the concept to get implemented. It is an effective metric that allows us to evaluate workflow and productivity. Lower lead time means the DevOps team is proactive and adapts quickly to feedback. The agile process used in DevOps enables faster TAT – Turnaround Time to meet customers’ requirements and take advantage of emerging trends.

5. Changing Volume

The wisdom behind DevOps support is to make frequent changes, but if the volume of change between deployments is not measured, then the deployment frequency metrics can be misleading.

The end objective should not be minor and for insubstantial changes to be made regularly. Instead, it should aim at updates that are impactful and improving overall experience. This will help measure progress easily, and help track and measure the amount of change with each deployment.

6. Defect Escape Rate

No matter how experienced a DevOps team is, errors are bound to happen, mainly when upgrades occur. Defects are part of software development, and one should take this aspect as part of the production process.

The defect escape rate is an important parameter that evaluates how frequently errors were discovered and rectified during the pre-production phase. It helps to assess the collective quality of the software release.

7. Customer Tickets

A good user experience means better customer satisfaction and increased sales. Also, the motivating factor for innovation is intended to improve customer satisfaction. Customer tickets are an effective measure of the DevOps team’s success.

Quality control should not be based on the customer tickets as a rule, as it means discovering errors and issues from third parties instead of the internal team. On the other hand, reduction or lower customer tickets indicate that application performance is seamless and of good quality.

How DevOps tools / services deliver faster and better quality?

Service providers provide DevOps tools that observe performance from top to bottom to understand how infrastructure impacts performance. The DevOps tools, which are cloud-based, work on the company’s business operations. It identifies issues in the testing, development, and production environments.

DevOps tools provide end-to-end visibility for cloud-native apps. It overcomes the fog associated with highly distributed systems. It gives complete insights into the business infrastructure and supporting cloud services.

Umbrella Infocare’s AWS Cloud DevOps Automation assists you in establishing organizational DevOps Automation Culture, automating processes, collaboration and monitoring utilizing best practices and top-notch tools.

With that said!

An organization’s DevOps practices’ success depends on its ability to track and measure KPIs and other metrics, evaluate the success, and identify improvement areas. Healthy AWS Cloud migration services coupled with effective DevOps practices reduce dependencies, enabling operations and developers to collaborate and deliver at high velocity.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

6 things to consider when you Migrate your Data Warehouse to Amazon Redshift

Nishant Sharma — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 06:50:32 +0000

Data warehouses have played a key role in analytics and decision-making at businesses for several years now, capturing data and powering dashboards and visualizations for management, marketing, finance, operations and essentially every other function in a data-driven organization.

The cloud has turbo-charged data warehousing, and as you consider your organization’s digital transformation and move your applications to the cloud, maximizing the value you derive from your data needs to be high on your list of priorities. This is where data warehouse migration becomes vital.

Why migrate your Data Warehouse to Amazon Redshift?

Amazon Redshift is a cloud-based data warehouse service from AWS that is fully managed and highly scalable. Why would you choose it over other solutions? Here are 4 reasons.

1. High Performance: Amazon Redshift RA3 instances offer maximized speed for operations needing high compute capacity. This, combined with Advanced Query Accelerator (AQUA) – a distributed and hardware-accelerated cache that boosts specific query types, ensures that Redshift delivers exceptionally high performance.

2. Auto Scaling: The number of nodes in your Redshift data warehouse can be modified through just an API call or a few clicks on the console, to scale your warehouse dynamically. Managed storage enables the automated addition of capacity for workloads as large as 8 PB.

3. Serverless: Amazon Redshift Serverless makes your warehouse simple to run and scale, with the infrastructure management taken care of automatically. This means that data can be simply loaded and queried to gain insights.

4. Lake House Architecture: With Redshift in conjunction with its Amazon Redshift Spectrum service, it is possible to bring together your data lake and data warehouse into your Lake House architecture to enable scalable data lakes, streamlined movement, a single point of control, and optimized cost.

5. Separation of Compute from Storage: Amazon Redshift RA3 instances make it possible to scale and pay for the number of nodes that you require for your compute workloads, while your managed storage costs are independently based on your data warehouse storage needs.

Factors to consider when migrating to Amazon Redshift

Now that we’ve established why you need to consider migrating your data warehouse to the cloud, and more specifically to Amazon Redshift, here are some important considerations for you to keep in mind.

1. How large is your data warehouse?
As a starting point to planning your migration, it’s important to determine just how large your source data warehouse is, so that you can provision your Redshift warehouse optimally. Towards this size estimation, make sure to take into consideration every data source that is going to tie into your Redshift warehouse, as well as every database, table and object.

2. How will you move your data?
Amazon Redshift is typically suited to warehousing massive volumes of data, in the order of petabytes. But it’s important to consider how you will transfer such volumes of data to AWS in the first place. This can be done either via networks through tools like AWS Direct Connect, or via physical devices provided by AWS through their Snow service.

3. Do you have specific data security requirements?
When large volumes of data are involved, security and privacy are always major considerations – this is addressed through cloud infra security, application security and data encryption. Of these, the security of your applications remains in your hands. For infra, AWS offers strong security out of the box. And in addition to this, Redshift gives you the ability to configure encryption of data wherever it is required, to reinforce data security.

4. What is the extent of data transformation and remapping required?
Since Amazon Redshift is a different platform from your source data warehouse, your data will need to be transformed to fit the target warehouse setup. Be sure to take into account the extent of work and time this process will require, to restructure the data and map it accurately to its destination. This is also where your choice of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) solution has a role to play.

5. What tools will you use for the migration?
Think of the legacy tools you are currently using, and whether there are AWS-native tools better suited to your cloud environment that you can use instead for more streamlined operations. Bear in mind, though, that Redshift does not tie you down to only tools from Amazon, so choose what works best for you. Also, Redshift is built based on PostgreSQL, meaning it maintains compatibility with all SQL queries.

6. How frequently do changes occur on your existing warehouse?
While planning for your migration to Redshift, an important factor to consider is the frequency of changes occurring on your existing data warehouse, which will dictate how frequently you need to sync your source warehouse and your Redshift instance. Additionally, when you make the switch from your existing system to Redshift, this cutover needs to be completed within one such interval period to ensure that the new Redshift-based data warehouse gets started without the loss of any data.

Umbrella Infocare is an AWS Redshift Delivery partner, and we regularly work with our clients to modernize their data warehouses. With our management and enablement solutions for Redshift, you can query and combine massive volumes of data, scale your warehouse as you grow, and ensure sustained fast query performance at all times. Talk to us today for more on how we could help your business.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

Busting DevSecOps Myths

Nishant Sharma — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 04:59:48 +0000

DevOps adoption is gathering rapid momentum, shaped by the ‘lingering’ experience of the pandemic. The annual global GitLab survey finds that for the first time DevOps teams are serious about its practice and are focusing on specific objectives to accelerate adoption. This has resulted in 60% of respondents releasing codes 2x faster than pre-pandemic rates, a 25% increase from 2020.

But releasing at speed and scale is hazardous if security is not tightly integrated into systems which not only increases vulnerability but more importantly, increases the cost of repairing. However, security integration continues to elude organizations with only 22% of the surveyed respondents having deep security integration according to State of the Art DevOps Report by Puppet, CircleCI and Splunk.

What is Stalling Growth

Organizations have understood the importance of security automation in release but they struggle to implement it. The question that begs an answer is why is it difficult to embed security practices in DevOps. The answer lies buried in the quest for commercial considerations which rewards speed in delivery with scant regards for security implications. Where feature delivery is a priority, security takes a back seat and becomes an afterthought—it is deemed an unnecessary loop which delays release, a small issue which can be fixed once the feature is delivered but is never resolved, unless there is an event.

Our experience also finds other issues holding up deeper security integration which primarily emanates from uninformed thought processes. It is worth taking a look into these issues as there is lack of clarity about what comprises DevSecOps practices. Below we explore few myths based on our experience and deep understanding of security issues.

Myth 1: Equating Shifting Left With DevSecOps

The practice of moving testing earlier in the development cycle does not automatically result in sound security practices unless it is accompanied by changes such as robust cross-team collaboration which empowers delivery teams to autonomously discover, prevent and remediate security issues. One of the basic approaches we take while implementing DevSecOps projects is to pull down knowledge silos by increasing awareness and facilitating collaboration between teams to identify security issues and establish measures to counter it.

A critical activity in cross-team collaboration is threat modelling wherein members from development, security, business teams brainstorm to identify potential threats and discuss measures to mitigate risks. Teams freely discuss threats, impact and trade-offs which results in better application design.

Myth 2: Adopting Agile is DevSecOps

There is a lot of confusion about Agile and DevSecOps—myths range from both being the same thing to taking a position of one versus the other. The truth lies in between—Agile and DevSecOps are complimentary practices that facilitate continuous improvements by emphasizing collaboration.

Agile development is a mindset to create the best product in the shortest time in a flexible manner honed with multiple tests. While DevSecOps objectives are similar, it seeks to build safety into the methods by integrating security at every stage of the development cycle—Agile is the foundation while DevSecOps ensures release processes are agile, safer and more secure.

Myth 3: Security Processes Slows Development Pipeline

Moving security processes up the development chain often causes heartburn amongst developers of increasing the workload with quality assurance and security. However, developers do not manually intervene as security processes are fully automated with specific types of tooling that automate the process without additional effort on the part of the developer.

We have implemented DevSecOps projects and empowered development teams with advanced tools to scan security, visualize and detect vulnerabilities and work as nimble teams to release functionality quicker. It does not mean roles and responsibilities of quality and security go away but developers work in conjunction to set up a pipeline with tools to do the heavy lifting.

Myth 4: The Gap Between Processes and Practice

If security processes are not baked into the CICD pipeline, cracks show up during high pressure and organizations give priority to feature release over security requirements. Often security processes are imperative, adopted on an-ad hoc basis to fulfill immediate objectives and ignored once the need has been met. To avoid this, we advise customers to make security processes declarative and automate the system using a CICD pipeline.

We have enabled customers to automate the entire development and operations environment to scan and test including unit testing of application code, source control repositories, container registries, CICD pipeline, APIs, release management and application performance after release. New Cloud-native technologies like containers and microservices are a major part of DevOps initiatives and security practices must also adapt to embrace these technologies.

At the same time, it is important to incorporate a robust monitoring and log tracking solution to ensure full compliance with the declarative processes. However, being compliant is not the same as being secure as compliance only meets business needs and does not address actual threats. For example, a policy to fix vulnerability within 60 days may well provide a window to the attacker and therefore policies must be reviewed periodically.

Going Forward

Embedding security practices within a DevOps culture has positive outcomes for software development—it enables code delivery on demand, and boosts developer confidence in security practices. More importantly, it helps to establish security as a shared responsibility amongst everyone in software delivery and people are diligent about issues and willing to halt deployment if a situation arises.

For long, security has been viewed as an inhibitor to software development but with an array of advanced tools available, our experience finds that security is actually an enabler to unleash high quality codes at speed.

If you want to know more about embedding security practices in DevOps, reach out to us.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog

5 reasons you need to consider DevOps Managed Services NOW!

Nishant Sharma — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 09:11:26 +0000

DevOps involves bringing together Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) to make the software development lifecycle (SDLC) faster, enable continuous delivery and ensure high quality. In 2021, 83% of IT decision makers reported implementing DevOps practices to unlock higher business value.

However, despite this wide acceptance, according to the 2021 State of DevOps Report by Puppet, the number of firms that identify their level of DevOps evolution as “mid-level” is as high as 78%. The report goes on to say that “these (mid-level) companies have failed to understand and address the cultural, organizational, and process changes required to adopt new ways of working with technology”.

To put it simply, setting in place an effective internal DevOps practice is hard! There are major cultural changes to be made, not to mention building capabilities in DevOps practice and DevOps infrastructure.

This is where Managed DevOps (also called DevOps Managed Services or DevOps as a Service) comes into the picture.

What is Managed DevOps?

Managed DevOps typically involves infrastructure management, deployment, release automation, monitoring, and optimization at every stage of the software development lifecycle.

A DevOps Managed Services Provider (MSP) can help take the load of DevOps implementation off your hands. With certified DevOps specialists, this means seamless software development, continuous deployment, and constant monitoring for enhanced performance and minimized errors, all at greater speed – without you needing to build these capabilities yourself.

Why is it important for your business transformation?

A DevOps MSP helps to deliver business transformation by facilitating continuous innovation and enhanced user experience, to create a competitive advantage for the business.

This is achieved by hitting the ground running with experienced and certified professionals at the MSP, who are already equipped to deliver value.

Here are 5 key benefits of partnering with a DevOps Managed Services partner.

1. Focus on your core business

With the hassles of building and maintaining an in-house IT team taken off your plate, you are left with the time and resources to invest into your business. And with an expert team to support you, implementing business strategies becomes more efficient as well.

2. Reduce IT costs

With a predictable and optimized technology budget, Managed DevOps delivers greater value at lower costs. You also save time and cost on expensive recruitment of a DevOps team, besides investments into the software and tools they would require.

3. Enhance speed to market

A key benefits of DevOps is to make the SDLC faster – when performed by an experienced team, these benefits are magnified. From provisioning infra to development and deployment of code, each step harnesses automation to ensure speed and quality.

4. Tap into a deeper and wider talent pool

DevOps specialists are a scarce and in-demand resource, making it difficult to attract and retain quality talent. With an MSP, on the other hand, you have a pool of resources who are well equipped, and who also gain exposure to a wider variety of requirements and challenges.

5. Benefit from well-established processes

Considering that DevOps is at the core of a DevOps Managed Services business, providers of DevOps as a Service place a great deal of importance on perfecting their processes. With tried and tested solutions, and regular upskilling and certifications, you can expect to benefit from a well-oiled setup that delivers value.

Working with a DevOps Managed Services provider is a great way to benefit from DevOps without tying yourself down with the challenges of setting up a practice yourself. Schedule a consultation with our DevOps specialists today to discuss how to get started.

This article is originally published on Umbrella Infocare Blog