The Benefits of Cloud Incident Management For Businesses
Every business wants to provide continuous service to its customers, making digital services an “always on” offering. This means it’s critical to catch service-disrupting issues, and enterprises are meeting this challenge by adopting cloud incident management to their solutions lineup. But as they do this, they have to meet the risks of cloud computing too.
An estimated 94% of businesses use cloud technology. Whether your digital services are in the cloud, on a hybrid architecture, or you’re even thinking about moving to the cloud, you must have incident management processes in place to achieve continuous uptime and service resilience.
Migrating to the cloud is just the beginning of a company’s digital transformation. As you begin to change the very ways you think about development and deployment, the ways you monitor and troubleshoot your environment change too. In true “cloud-native” fashion, you want as few distractions from “lights on” activities as possible, so you can focus on higher priority responsibilities. Cloud incident management tools help companies spend less time hunting down issues by pointing to the root cause for quick resolution, getting you back on track.
“In true “cloud-native” fashion, you want as little distractions from “lights on” activities as possible so you can focus on developing and maintaining the application itself. Having incident management tools (like xMatters) helps companies spend less time hunting down those issues and point right to the root cause to get you back on track.”
– Seth Moffit, Solutions Architect, SADA
Cloud Incident Management Services Aren’t One Size Fits All
Think of cloud incident management as a safety net that keeps your business up and running, and your infrastructure informs how that net should be constructed. Consider the following pros and cons of cloud computing with some common cloud infrastructures you may have.
Private vs Public Clouds
Cloud services are either public, meaning they’re offered by third-party providers over the internet, or private, meaning they’re available exclusively to one entity.
Public clouds tend to be more scalable, so they can accommodate more data and often come at a lower price than their private counterparts, but are less flexible. Private clouds offer less scalability, but greater security and flexibility to support more complex transactions. As you grow your business in the cloud, incident management supports your digital services and helps deliver uninterrupted customer experiences.
For an added layer of flexibility, enterprises can opt for a hybrid cloud-and-on-premise or a multi-cloud environment to house their digital services. When it comes to incident management, each holds unique benefits and challenges.
Hybrid Cloud
In a hybrid cloud, incident management gives you a full range of visibility into the environments that your digital services are housed in; These are a connected mix of on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud services. If there’s a service disruption in any of your environments, your incident management system will be on top of it ready to alert the right team members and resolve issues fast.
Multi-cloud
Not all clouds are created equal, and some enterprises house their digital services on multiple public clouds. Generally, this cloud strategy is attractive to those who want access to different cloud services, such as compute resources and data storage options. It’s also ideal for enterprises that don’t want to be locked into working with only one vendor, which may pose a greater business and security risk.
Processes and systems that apply to one cloud may not necessarily apply to another, which is why it’s essential to create cohesion in every cloud environment you rely on. Thankfully cloud incident management can identify and alert you about any service degradation, no matter where it is.
When your cloud-based digital services integrate with an incident management system, you can automate incident management processes and mitigate the risks of cloud computing. Your IT and DevOps teams will thank you when they’re spending more time building and releasing digital services and less time troubleshooting.
“Having a good incident management plan in place keeps all of your cloud-based services safe.”
– Mario Guisado, Director of Support, xMatters
How Cloud Incident Management Can Save You Money
Try as we might, there’s no perfect digital service. And when something goes wrong, a cloud incident management system that effectively and efficiently allocates resources can save time and money.
Let’s face it, service disruptions are costly. In 2018, the average cost of service downtime was nearly $300,000. As budgets grow by nearly 4% a year (Gartner, 2020) IT, DevOps teams are increasing their maintenance budgets to keep up with the growing demand for digital services in the pandemic era.
When multiple systems are dependent on one another, one service disruption leads to another. Consider hybrid cloud architecture as an example. A service in the cloud is dependent on an on-premise service. If the cloud service degrades, you will have to repair the on-premise service too.
With xMatters, our incident management platform receives monitoring signals from both environments so you can address the degradation before it affects customers. With fewer incidents and shorter resolution times, your team can focus on innovation and revenue-generating new features.
Effective Communication Reduces the Risks of Cloud
As SaaS businesses embrace a DevOps collaboration style, many teams support business services. That makes effective communication critical, especially in the case of a service disruption. If your architecture is built on multiple cloud environments and one service is affected, likely all of them are. A cloud incident management platform provides visibility into all your services so you can see potential disruptions early.
Create an organization-wide response plan so you can mitigate issues before they affect customers. Enable teams to alert key on-call team members so they can start executing against the plan immediately. Teams can also notify important stakeholders, including executives and customers, so your response team can work on the issue uninterrupted. After all, the worst thing to do at 3 am is delegate tasks to fix service disruptions.
To achieve uninterrupted customer experiences, the xMatters virtual workflow builder Flow Designer connects virtually any tools into intelligent workflows. Use pre-built workflows or build your own to automate toil, resolve issues, and collect incident data for later use. xMatters integrates with tools from virtually any source, including cloud-native Google Operations Suite, Application Performance Management (APM), and ChatOps to ensure that your digital services achieve maximum uptime.
Build an Iron-Clad Cloud Architecture
Catching and fixing issues with cloud incident management can help your infrastructure weather any storm. Using xMatters for your cloud transformation streamlines communication, keeps costs down, and ensures the continuity of your digital services. To optimize costs, teams with under 10 members can use xMatters for free. Using the best of our workflows and cloud tools, DevOps and SRE teams can monitor and game plan against any customer-facing service issue!