If your organization currently operates in the cloud, there could still be many complex technical and budgetary challenges to overcome:

• Undocumented or poorly documented architecture can be hard to navigate, and difficult to understand. If Infrastructure as Code like Terraform or Ansible isn’t being used, it becomes a nightmare to manage.

• Cloud systems are rarely optimized for efficiency and are usually spending thousands of dollars more than they should.

• Difficult to hire the right people that know what they are doing, and they are extremely expensive employees.

• Poor security posture can lead to compromised platforms and worst yet data breaches and theft. Improving your posture can help bring your platform into compliance and reduce the amount of attack vectors which people can leverage. Problematic areas are typically:

  • Too much network access

  • Lack of least privileged access (too many admins)

  • Lack of separation of responsibilities

  • Poor rotation policies such as SSH Keys/Login Credentials

  • Lack of Software/System Patches

• Cloud architecture usually stems from an environment based on non-cloud architecture, and it rarely utilizes best practices when implementing high availability, disaster recovery, backup strategy, system monitoring, and not leveraging managed cloud services. Most of these practices are critical to compliance and could cause you significant loss of business if not implemented properly.

As both software and infrastructure engineers, this gives us a unique perspective on application and cloud needs. We’ve seen a lot of organizations run on a variety of public and private clouds, and are rarely utilizing the clouds efficiently and effectively.

• We’ve built and maintain massive cloud infrastructure and brought it in compliance in order to achieve high available, reproducible and testable disaster recovery, and in-depth monitoring to know when and where things go wrong (because they inevitable do).

• We make heave use of Infrastructure as Code tools to allow for repeatable and scalable solutions, and design things in a way so your business and infrastructure can stand the test of time.

• It is hard to find the right people, and when you do they are extremely expensive and fickle resources. Lots of organizations hire sub-par engineers causing a wide range of issues that could only rear their head when things go disastrously wrong.