Cloud Computing Management

Introduction

• Managing the resources and their performance is the responsibility of cloud provider.
• Management of resources involves various aspects of cloud computing like load balancing, performance, storage, backups, capacity, deployment etc.
• The management is necessary to access complete functionality of resources in the cloud.

Cloud Management Tasks

The cloud provider executes the number of tasks to verify efficient use of cloud resources.

Some of the cloud management tasks executed by cloud provider are:

1) Audit System Backups

It is needed to audit backups timely to verify restoring of randomly selected files of different users.

Following are the two ways to perform backups:
i) Backing up files by the company, from on-site computers to disks which occupy in the cloud.
ii) Backing up files by the cloud provider.

2) Data Flow of the System

The managers are responsible to develop a diagram to describe a detailed process flow. This process flow explains the movement of data belonging to an organization throughout the cloud solution.

3) Vendor Lock-In Awareness and Solutions

• The procedure to exit from services of a particular cloud provider  must be known to the managers.
• The procedures are defined to allow the cloud mangers to export data of an organization from their system to another cloud provider.

4) Knowing Provider's Security Procedures

It is important to the security plans of the provider for the services like Multiuser use, E-commerce processing, Employee screening, Encryption policy.

5) Monitoring Capacity Planning and Scaling Capabilities

• The manager should know the capacity planning for checking whether the cloud provider would be able to meet the future requirement of business or not.
• The managers should manage the scaling capabilities for ensuring services that can be scaled up or down, according to the need.

6) Monitor Audit Log Use

To recognize the errors in the system, managers should audit the log on a regular basis.

7) Solution Testing and Validation

When a cloud provider offers a solution, it is necessary to test that solution and verify the results and for error-free solution. It is mandatory for a system to be robust and reliable.