You’re looking to streamline IT operations management. Which cloud computing services should you consider?

Streamlining IT operations management can be greatly facilitated by leveraging cloud computing services. Here are some key cloud services to consider for this purpose: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) Containers as a Service (CaaS) Function as a Service (FaaS) / Serverless Computing Database as a Service (DBaaS) Monitoring and Management Tools Identity and Access Management (IAM) Before selecting specific cloud services, assess your organization's requirements, budget, and existing infrastructure. Consider factors such as scalability, reliability, security, and integration capabilities to choose the most suitable options for streamlining IT operations management.

Before considering IaaS to replace your existing servers and infrastructure, you should consider some of the other options for cloud computing such as PaaS and SaaS. While IaaS can make life simpler for you and your team in many ways, you are still on the hook for the actual operations of the software, databases, and systems. Switching to PaaS or SasS, can offload some of this work to another vendor, and also allows you to free up your own staff, and not require quite as large an IaaS environment. It does mean that you have less direct control over the system however, but at the same time the environment will be managed by people dedicated to it – a trade off you and the organization will need to make.

PaaS will offer you the best value when you want to streamline the IT operations. PaaS offers you a flexible and scalable approach without doing too much administrative and maintenance work. PaaS offerings will reduce your spending on the operational administration and maintenance. This will help you optimize IT resources and costs in the longer run. You can focus on development of the core business functions, as the administration and maintenance of underlying hardware is the responsibility of cloud providers. PaaS will help you achieve automation with the help of different tools and frameworks. This will further bring down your DevOps costs.

Software as a Service is a mixed bag, and you should be fully aware of the pros and cons of switching to a SaaS solution. When talking with vendors make sure you completely understand their support structure, especially after hours, weekends, and holidays. Once you offload responsibility from your internal team to a vendor, you need to be sure they will be as committed as your team was, and can be reached in the case of an emergency. Another critical thing to fully understand is termination and separation. You need to know how long, and how much support, you will get if things do not go well and you want to move to a different vendor, or bring it back in-house again.

You will need to do some very deep diving before considering DaaS. If the data is part of a larger system, make sure you can interface with your DaaS provider, directly or through APIs. If your data is sensitive in nature, you also have to make sure the DaaS provider is secure. Also consider if there is legal requirements for your data, such as keeping it on-shore, or specific levels of encryption and access control. However, if everything passes these assessments, DaaS can be a very powerful service both by providing reasonably priced large capacity along with good backup and protection.

Moving data from one platform or application to another “in the cloud” is like putting old gas in a new Ferrari. Still runs like crap. And dumping everything into a data lake that becomes a data swamp is also missing the point. You must cleanse, transform and build data quality from the source out.