We’re coming up on 4 months into this current topsy-turvy world of ours that is the global COVID pandemic. While absolutely no one is pleased that this has transpired the way that it has, there’s going to be more than a few who’ll say it’s best to just roll with the punches and do what’s needed to get through it. Any time you have a chance to have the mettle of something tested in the climate of challenges and adversity there is the possibility for learning, and when that’s about learning about the application of what you ‘have’ there’s value in that.
We imagine we are much the same as any other good Canadian web hosting provider here at 4GoodHosting in that we can’t help but take an interest in every single turn in the world of digital connectivity and the realm of e-commerce. Not so much because we work in it of sorts, but really more because the nature of what we do gives us a front row to seat to all of this. Both in what has the potential to do or become for the people who make up our clientele, and also with how it has the potential to affect the directions we’ll be taking in the future.
The meteoric rise to precedence taken by cloud computing has been one such topic. One of the things that people like us and industry experts have taken notice of is how the new and challenging realities of COVID have made us all come to new understandings about our utilization of the Cloud. 3 of them in particular are ‘hard lessons’ worthy of some discussion, so that’s what we’re going to do here today.
Cloudops - More Important Than First Realized
For most enterprises, cloud operations have continued to be by and large an afterthought and that’s been especially true after the deployment of them. While IT organizations have given it some attention, the reality is the constraint of cloudops best practices and the use of the technology is most attributable to limited budgets and a general lack of understanding. With this pandemic those shortcomings have had a spotlight shone on them in a big way.
Much of this is attributable to the increased use of public cloud providers and cloud systems being accessed by an increasingly numerous and industry-crossing remote workforce. This has put increasing focus on the need for operational tools and talent. Cloudops were in place, but it seems their self-correcting capacities aren’t up to scratch for dealing with scaling on such an instantly-bigger level.
We’re continuing to see so many enterprises lacking the tools to automate self-correcting processes, and then there’s the often concurrent issue of a lack of available talent to set up the systems properly. Whether that shortage is temporary or not remains to be seen once all of this is over, because it’s quite likely that the expansion of cloud utilization is outstripping the supply of individuals qualified to be setting up the different platforms properly.
Urgent Need for Solid Enterprise API Strategies
The way data integration has gone from a nice-to-have to have to a necessity in record time is something that’s one of them more front and centre aspects of the Cloud shift. Then there’s the similar need for enterprises to be sharing services that bind behaviour to data. Leveraging well-secured and governed APIs is the solution to both those challenges, but that still remains a challenge and it’s one of those areas where more thought would have gone into it if the need had not been so pressing with the Cloud.
While it’s true that some systems have APIs (ones provided by SaaS vendors in particular), the majority of cloud-based custom enterprise applications have little to nothing in the way of APIs providing access to system data and services. It’s for this reason that integrations need to occur using one-off processes that won’t scale as the business needs to change because of the problems created by this current global pandemic.
Remote Workers & Cloud Security Not An Easy Pairing
Even before all of this befell the world cloud security teams were already working with remote employees, and enterprises became quickly aware that an employee’s home network is not the company’s network.
Look no further than VPNs, virtual private clouds, encryption, and legal compliances for vulnerabilities around cloud security, and much of that as a result of a completely remote workforce. Security teams working with cloud infrastructure were overwhelmed with the speed with which all this was required, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise then that in many cases what was built in response to the demand didn’t cut the mustard.
It’s been reported that the risk of a breach increased from .0001 percent for most enterprises to .2 percent in a few weeks following the new digital and working world realities that came with the pandemic, and that has to be a red flag for cloud computing security experts moving forward with all of this.
