How to ensure best practice when modernising your cloud environment

A lack of data visibility and technical know-how are often at odds with a company’s ability to modernise its IT estate. It’s a catch-22 – to stay competitive, you need the latest cloud features, but to maintain operational efficiency, you need to optimise strategically. If this sounds like a familiar challenge, you’re not alone. According to Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud report, lack of resources or expertise (78%), managing software licenses (78%), governance (76%) and compliance (75%) are among the top cloud challenges organisations face.

Addressing performance, compliance and security

The more IT leaders I talk to, the more instances I find of companies that adopted the cloud in a hurry, using a ‘’lift and shift’’ migration. Of course, there are many benefits to this approach, including speed, reduced costs and simplicity. However, it can also lead to sub-optimal performance and security concerns. 

An under-optimised cloud environment can slow down the deployment of applications and services, affecting a company’s ability to bring new products to market. It also leads to wasted spending on unused or underutilised resources. Indeed, Flexera’s aforementioned report reveals that wasted software spend in the public cloud is 24%. 

Likewise, rapid migration to the cloud often means insufficient time to consider the specific regulatory requirements that govern data protection, privacy and security. For example, financial institutions need to adhere to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Failure to comply with these industry-specific regulations can result in legal repercussions and financial penalties. And, of course, as you know, compliance often hinges on having robust security measures in place to protect sensitive data. A recent report from Radware reveals that 69% of organisations say that multi-cloud security configurations have led to data breaches or exposures. 

As such, a hasty migration can often mean gaps in security and lead to misconfigured storage buckets, inadequate encryption and insufficient access controls. Each of these can lead to data breaches and non-compliance with your Cyber Essentials certification.

Adopting a Well-Architected Framework to ensure best practice

Despite the cloud optimisation challenges you may be facing, modernising your IT estate doesn’t need to be a chaotic and disorganised endeavour. Adopting a Well-Architected Framework can provide you with the core tools, design principles and operational methodologies you need to achieve best practice. The Well-Architected Framework encourages rightsizing to avoid over-provisioning and underutilisation. 

By dynamically scaling your resources based on demand, you can ensure you won’t be paying for idle resources. Setting up proper tagging and resource categorisation will give you better visibility over your current infrastructure and, in turn, you’ll be able to budget more effectively and make better decisions about resource allocation. 

The approach is based on the following five pillars: 

• Reliability: Is the platform resilient, available and recoverable?
• Cost Optimisation: How can a cloud investment be used to maximum effect?
• Operational Excellence: Are workloads run and managed effectively?
• Performance Efficiency: Does resource capacity meet demand without over or under-utilisation?
• Security: What safeguards are in place to protect the cloud platform?

This structured approach ensures that you will strike the right balance of performance, security and cost management while achieving operational excellence and long-term business continuity.

Rightsizing an IT estate with robust governance

At Claranet, we used the principles of a Well-Architected Framework to help Funky Pigeon rightsize its cloud environment. As a company that always faces seasonal spikes in website traffic, Funky Pigeon had to ensure its online platform was stable and fully functional during busy periods. To cope with these unpredictable spikes, the company migrated its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Although this offered the scalability and flexibility to cope with increased demand, the system wasn’t properly configured for advanced data analysis and had to be optimised. 

What’s more, the company wanted to reduce its running costs by 10% year-over-year without impacting its business performance. Our cloud specialists did a deep dive into Funky Pigeon’s infrastructure, reviewing the website, business operations and risks to identify areas for improvement. Following the assessment, we highlighted the need to leverage automation and employ best practices for continual improvement. 

For security, we deployed an AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) and, to ensure governance and compliance, we implemented AWS CloudTrail. Once the optimisation process was complete, web-tier sizing was reduced by approximately 50%, which led to a 35% cost saving during peak traffic times. 

Overall, we helped Funky Pigeon reduce its cloud costs by 40% during the first year and by an additional 25% the following year. 

From the first day of this project, the Claranet team worked tirelessly to help us achieve all of our ambitious business objectives and reduced our running costs considerably, meaning it is practically paying for itself! The biggest benefit is that by eliminating manual deployments, our in-house dev teams can focus on innovation, ensuring the company can continue to grow and remain competitive.

Brett King, Head of Service Delivery at Funky Pigeon

Schedule a Cloud Optimisation Assessment

Claranet’s Cloud Optimisation Assessment combines industry-leading best practices, a Well-Architected Framework and our own real-world experience and expertise to help you find value in your chosen cloud technology. Find out more about how our Assessment can help you implement best practices while you modernise your IT estate. Schedule your Cloud Optimisation Assessment today.