3 Ways to Optimize Your Cloud Post-Cloud Migration

If you’ve been on the cloud for a while, it’s time to look at your cloud strategy and determine if it is allowing you to get the best experience and continuing to meet your needs. Are you getting the fastest speeds possible – or even the speeds that your workloads demand? Are you getting the best bang for your buck? In this post, we’ll look at some areas in your cloud strategy that can be optimized to continue driving the best experience possible on the cloud.

1. Boost Performance

Having ultra-fast performance on the cloud is important. Especially if you’ve moved some of your mission-critical workloads like Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to the cloud. However, the public cloud has limitations when it comes to performance. Because it is a shared environment, the cloud providers put throttles on how much performance each of its customers can get. Meaning unless you are willing to pay for additional cloud resources you don’t need – and don’t plan to use – you aren’t going to get the speeds that these heavy workloads demand. There are a number of ways that you can boost your performance: from understanding how you’re being charged for IOPS and overprovisioning to make room for performance fluctuations to configuring SSDs with RAID0 and making sure you’re using snapshots wisely.

2. Reduce Your Cloud Bill

The cloud is supposed to be more cost-efficient than on-prem. After all, you aren’t paying to maintain the datacenter, or the staff needed to run it. However, without careful monitoring, cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control. Perhaps your team is taking a lot of snapshots of data, or you spin up Dev/Test environments but then forget to shut them down. The more resources you use on the cloud, the higher your cloud bill is going to be. Luckily, there are a few easy ways that you can reduce your cloud bill – such as leveraging machine learning or taking advantage of overprovisioning — so you are only paying for the resources you are actually using.

3. Improve Resiliency and Manageability

Breaking news of outages on the cloud seem to dominate our newsfeeds. If you’ve been lucky enough never to have gone through an outage, it is probably a worry in the back of your mind. There are a few things you can do to improve the resiliency of your workloads on the cloud as well as make the cloud more manageable to get a better experience. These include using snapshots for Disaster Recovery purposes, spreading data across cloud zones, and keeping careful track of maintenance windows.

The Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform

If you’re looking to take your cloud strategy to the next level, the Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform can take you there. Silk is a virtualization layer that lives between your workloads and the underlying cloud infrastructure. Silk offers up to 10x faster performance on the cloud compared to native cloud alone. With enterprise data services such as data reduction and zero-footprint snapshots, users can reduce their cloud bill by limiting the number of cloud resources being used. Without refactoring, Silk makes it possible for mission-critical workloads such as Oracle, Microsoft SQl Server, and industry-specific applications such as EHR to move onto Google Cloud and Azure. All while continuing to maintain the same great user experience these workloads saw on-prem. With a self-healing, active-active architecture and machine learning-based monitoring, Silk lets you rest easy knowing that disruptions are being proactively monitored and the risk of downtime is minimized.