Cloud computing

We’ve done our research and pulled together this must-have guide to getting the most out of your cloud deployment.

Whether you’re just starting out, in the midst of a deployment or a seasoned pro, we hope you’ll find this brief summary of value.

Best practices for minimising planned downtime in a cloud environment

• Design services with high availability and disaster recovery in mind. Leverage the multi-availability zones provided by cloud vendors in your infrastructure.
• If your services have a low tolerance for failure, consider multi-region deployments with automated failover to ensure the best business continuity possible.
• Define and implement a disaster recovery plan in line with your business objectives that provide the lowest possible recovery time (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
• Consider implementing dedicated connectivity. These services provide a dedicated network connection between you and the cloud service point of presence. This can reduce exposure to the risk of business interruption from the public internet.
• Read the fine print on your Service Level Agreement (SLA). Are you guaranteed 99.9% uptime or even better? That 0.1% downtime equals about 45 minutes per month or around eight hours per year.

Best practices for minimising security and privacy risks

• This is important: Understand the shared responsibility model of your cloud provider. You’ll still be liable for what occurs within your network and in your product.
• Implement security at every level of your deployment.
• Know who is supposed to have access to each resource and service, and limit access to least privilege. If an employee goes rogue and gains access to your deployment, you would want their impact to be over the smallest area as possible.
• Make sure your cybersecurity team’s skills are up to the task.
• Take a risk-based approach to securing assets used in the cloud and extend security to the devices.
• Implement multi-factor authentication for all accounts accessing sensitive data or systems.
• Encryption, encryption, encryption. Turn on encryption wherever you can — easy wins are on object storage such as Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage where customer data often resides.

Best practices to help you reduce cloud attacks

• Make security a core aspect of all IT operations.
• Keep ALL your teams up-to-date with cloud security best practices.
• Ensure security policies and procedures are regularly checked and reviewed.
• Proactively classify information and apply access control.
• Use cloud services to automate compliance controls.
• Prevent data exfiltration.
• Integrate prevention and response strategies into security operations.
• Discover rogue projects with audits.
• Remove password access from accounts that do not need to log in to services.
• Review and rotate access keys and credentials.
• Follow security blogs and announcements to be aware of known attacks.
• Apply security best practices for any open-source software that you are using.
• Again, use encryption whenever and wherever possible. 

Best practices for maintaining control and flexibility

• Consider using a cloud provider partner to help with implementing, running, and supporting cloud services.
• Understand your responsibilities and the responsibilities of the cloud vendor in the shared responsibility model to reduce the chance of omission or error.
• Make time to understand your cloud service provider’s basic level of support. Will this service level meet your support requirements? Most cloud providers offer additional support tiers over and above the basic support for an additional cost.
• Make sure you understand the SLA concerning the infrastructure and services you’re going to use and how that will impact your agreements with your customers.

Best practices to decrease vendor dependency

• Design with cloud architecture best practices in mind. All cloud services provide the opportunity to improve availability and performance, decouple layers, and reduce performance bottlenecks. If you have built your services using cloud architecture best practices, you are less likely to have issues porting from one cloud platform to another.
• Properly understand what your vendors are selling to help avoid lock-in challenges.
• Build in flexibility as a matter of strategy when designing applications to ensure portability now and in the future.
• Build your applications with services that offer cloud-first advantages, such as modularity and portability of microservices and code. Think containers and Kubernetes.

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