If you’ve already taken the steps to get your business onto the cloud, you’ll want to make the most of it. Optimisation is the key to ensuring you’re at the forefront of your cloud experience, getting the most from it in every way possible – but how do you do that?

Microsoft Well-Architected Framework can help you and your business achieve your goals, and in turn provide a better service to your clients. It’s made up of five pillars – reliability, security, cost-optimisation, operational excellence and performance efficiency. Each of these guiding principles help to unlock the full potential of cloud computing and improve the quality of your workload.

Reliability

As a business owner or IT professional, you’ll want to ensure your systems are as reliable as your business. If something goes wrong, be that a malicious attack or a problem which results in your systems going down, having the peace of mind that things can be put right quickly and efficiently is vital.

Whereas previously, you may have purchased high-end hardware which minimised the chances of an entire application failing, the reliability principle in this framework looks to minimise these effects. Potential failures are anticipated, so solutions can be developed to ensure and increase reliability.

Identifying and looking at the health of your applications can help to improve your reliability, as this will allow you to take swift action where necessary.

Striving for automation improves a variety of aspects across the cloud thanks to minimising the consequences of human errors such as misconfigured software. Similarly, if your applications can deal with failures automatically this can lead to maximising the reliability of your cloud experience.

Alongside the above, consider scaling out your systems – this means adding resource units rather than increasing the size of your existing resources. By doing this you further reduce the effects of a single resource failing as you have more than one resource to rely on.

Security

Security is a cornerstone of any business ethos. If something isn’t secure, it isn’t reliable, and that translates to poor sales – or worse, loss of data. In order to build a cloud platform which works for you, security should be at the forefront of your mind. The security pillar of the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework involves identifying common vulnerabilities so you can prepare for a security breach if it should happen. Attackers will exploit your weak spots in any way they can, making it all the more important you cover all bases. Such bases include:

• Identity and access management
• Threat protection
• Cloud security
• Information protection
• Information governance
• Insider risk management
• Compliance management
• Discovering and responding

Cost-optimisation

The bottom line can never be ignored. In order to balance your business goals with your budget it’s essential to understand and focus on what you’re spending and where. Implementing a pay-as-you-go strategy with your cloud services means you’ll only pay for what you use – you won’t find large costs coming through at the end of the month for services you haven’t used. Cost calculators can help define what funding is going where from the outset, so you’ll know before you start what your likely outgoings will be.

Likewise, setting a budget and maintaining cost constraints will enable you to keep within your limits and measure what you’re spending. Measuring your scalability is also a way of ensuring cost-optimisation. In Azure, you can grow a service in a time-efficient, manner rather than trying to downscale larger operations which take a lot of downtime. Most of all, it’s imperative to continually monitor and optimise your cost management. Scale your resources up or down depending on demand – idle or underutilised resources could be reconfigured, consolidated or even shut down if necessary.

Measure and forecast your capacity needs – if you need to grow, look at how you can do that without going beyond your budget. Similarly, if you need to downscale, look at ways to do this without excessive downtime.

FinOps can help with your cost optimisation – this practice ensures your organisation’s spending on the cloud stays aligned with your business objectives. Here, the goal is for you to have more control over what you’re spending and be able to monitor where, when and how you can cut costs.

Operational excellence

Applications in the cloud need to run efficiently – operational excellence means reliability and predictability. If your applications are running as they should, you’ll have a well-performing system which reduces the chance of user error. Operational excellence works alongside your DevOps practices. In order to achieve operational excellence, you should consider how your software is developed, deployed, operated and maintained. Keeping these in mind will help to ensure your business needs are met while systems keep running smoothly.

Optimising your build and release processes allow you to create and manage environments throughout your software development lifecycle. This equals consistency, repetition and issues being detected early on – saving time and costs later down the line.

You should also implement systems to monitor all aspects of your workload, from infrastructure health to application health. This kind of monitoring will make sure you can see workload and take proactive steps to mitigate against issues.

Rehearsing recovery is also a key part of operational excellence – that way you can see what works and what doesn’t while identifying weak points and areas for improvement. As far as improvement is concerned, you can always go further. Aiming for continuous operational improvement is a good way to reduce complexity and ambiguity over time.

It’s equally important that as part of your plans for operational excellence, you provide and encourage a team culture amongst your colleagues which encompasses experimentation and growth, solutions for rationalising your current operations and incident response plans in case something should happen.

Performance efficiency

The more work you and your colleagues take on, the more you need systems in place to cope with the workload as required. The performance efficiency pillar of Microsoft’s Well-Architected Framework suggests scaling appropriately for your needs and, where appropriate, implementing PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings that have in-built scaling.

Planning for increased capacity in your cloud environment is as important as planning for an increased capacity in an on-premises environment. It’s recommended that to achieve performance efficiency, you scale in and out depending on your workload. While scaling out improves resilience through building redundancy, scaling in can help reduce costs through shutting down capacity you no longer need.

Through testing application performance early on and often, you can establish efficiency through stress tests and detect issues which may arise. Lastly, by looking at the system as a whole, you can assess the overall health of the solution, capture and re-evaluate the needs of your workload as you go. The principles listed above are the foundations of a strong cloud experience. By taking these on board, and implementing them where you can, you’ll find you not only increase the overall effectiveness of your cloud management