Maximize Infrastructure Security and Uptime with Cloud Managed Services 

Cloud adoption has become mainstream among businesses of all sizes and across various industries. Enterprises that have implemented a cloud infrastructure can build, test, and deploy software solutions with a minimal turnaround time. This gives businesses a competitive edge over their market competitors. By hosting business solutions on cloud infrastructure, enterprises can scale computing resources flexibly and overcome hardware deployments, thereby saving operational expenses. 

However, enterprises seeking ways to maintain a robust cloud infrastructure should focus on key aspects like uptime and security. When a business’s cloud infrastructure encounters frequent downtime, it results in major service disruptions. The impact of cyber threats on cloud infrastructure can cause application crashes and data losses, leading to poor customer relationships and potential legal penalties. To bypass such consequences, businesses should consider leveraging cloud infrastructure maintenance services. 

Relevance of Cloud Infrastructure Maintenance with Managed Service Providers 

Maintaining a cloud infrastructure with greater uptime requires consistent monitoring and preventive issue resolution support. The varying nature of the cloud ecosystem necessitates the incorporation of robust authentication and authorization mechanisms in cloud infrastructure. However, when business leaders and stakeholders delegate the responsibility of cloud infrastructure maintenance to internal IT teams, ensuring continuous and proactive maintenance becomes challenging. That’s why collaborating with dedicated cloud managed services providers is essential. 

This association enables businesses to hire a team of skilled cloud professionals with expertise in infrastructure monitoring, security management, disaster recovery configuration, and DevOps practices. This extensive expertise guarantees enterprises robust infrastructure maintenance and greater returns on cloud investments. With the help of cloud management solution providers, businesses can: 

• Ensure constant infrastructure monitoring and eliminate major service disruptions and downtime. 

• Incorporate automation frameworks in cloud infrastructure to facilitate on-demand resource scaling. 

• Embed advanced encryption and identity and access management solutions in cloud infrastructure and improve the overall security levels. 

Best Practices Followed by Cloud Experts for Improving Infrastructure Uptime 

1. High Availability Architecture Design 

The single point of failure is one of the major attacks that impact cloud infrastructure uptime. These attacks are caused due to configuration errors across the compute, network, storage, and database resources in a cloud infrastructure. Infrastructure resources with errors can result in the unavailability of cloud workloads, impacting business continuity. To resolve this, cloud management solutions providers adopt a high availability architecture design approach. 

High-availability architecture design refers to the incorporation of redundant mechanisms into an existing cloud infrastructure. Dedicated cloud experts utilize version control tools for configuration management and failover automation tools for resource duplication. The version control tool programmed by cloud experts consistently monitors, audits, and eliminates configuration changes across cloud infrastructure resources. The failover automation tool autonomously identifies and duplicates errored cloud resources with proper configurations, ensuring infrastructure availability. 

2. Monitoring and Incident Response 

Cloud management consulting firms implement advanced monitoring frameworks in the enterprise’s cloud infrastructure. Dedicated cloud management solutions providers program the native AI-powered diagnostics engine in monitoring frameworks to track and resolve performance errors in computing systems, storage instances, and networking devices. The diagnostic engine utilizes machine learning algorithms to assess and classify the type of performance error and trigger appropriate incident response workflow. This approach eliminates performance errors before they impact the cloud infrastructure’s availability and resilience. 

Best Practices Followed by Cloud Experts for Reinforcing Infrastructure Security 

1. Automated Patch Management 

Dedicated experts from cloud management consulting firms depend on automated patch management solutions to automate patching workflows and eliminate vulnerabilities. By configuring and integrating patch management software in cloud infrastructure, consultants ensure automated scanning of security vulnerabilities. When discovered, the software extracts the appropriate patches from the repository and implements them in the cloud environment, resolving vulnerabilities and improving infrastructure security. 

By incorporating automated patch management solutions, cloud management consulting professionals eliminate manual patching practices. This reduces the possibility of errors, such as inappropriate patch selection and misconfiguring dependencies. 

2. Identity and Access Management 

To strengthen the access permissions and security of cloud infrastructure, a managed cloud service provider uses identity and access management solutions. By leveraging IAM solutions, cloud experts can set up role-based access control, session management, and authentication conditions within the cloud infrastructure. These mechanisms ensure the least privilege access to cloud workloads and restrict security breaches and attacks, ensuring cloud infrastructure security.  

The managed cloud service provider ensures that identity and access management solutions audit and log all the access request actions within a cloud infrastructure. This simplifies cloud infrastructure compliance management for internal teams and business stakeholders. 

3. Endpoint Threat Detection and Response 

Endpoint threat detection and response systems are intelligent infrastructure defense solutions implemented by managed cloud computing services providers. Dedicated cloud service providers configure detection systems to consistently monitor endpoint resources like virtual machines, containers, APIs, and edge devices deployed within the cloud infrastructure. This continuous monitoring enables the underlying AI and machine learning models to assess the presence and patterns of threats and isolate the impacted endpoint from other infrastructure resources. After isolation, EDR systems trigger intelligent resolution workflows and neutralize threats, improving cloud infrastructure security. 

Key Aspects to Focus on When Delegating Infrastructure Maintenance to Cloud Managed Services 

Enterprises that work with managed cloud services providers can acquire access to a team of dedicated specialists and time-tested cloud management platform and infrastructure maintenance practices. However, when businesses decide to delegate infrastructure maintenance initiatives to a managed cloud computing services provider, they should consider key aspects: 

• Service-Level Agreements – This agreement is the base of service management engagement. When collaborating with a cloud managed services provider, businesses should ensure that they comply with service-level agreements and dedicated infrastructure maintenance support. 

• Compliance Certifications – A reputable cloud service provider should possess certifications related to cloud infrastructure management and comply with regulatory standards. 

• Team Scalability – The cloud infrastructure maintenance and management workloads vary based on operational demands. That’s why enterprises should ensure that potential managed services providers offer scalable team support and ensure robust infrastructure availability. 

• Billing – A cloud managed service provider should offer transparent invoices that include a detailed breakdown of maintenance and support costs without any hidden details. This transparent billing is vital for maintaining lasting relationships. 

Final Words 

When businesses consider the above-mentioned aspects for managed services provider evaluation, they can collaborate with the right cloud partner and ensure robust infrastructure maintenance. With the help of reliable cloud partners, businesses can leverage proven strategies and practices for cloud infrastructure maintenance and ensure greater uptime. Apart from availability, dedicated cloud experts incorporate security mechanisms in cloud infrastructure and ensure greater resilience.