The cloud and Pedro's new life

Most of those responsible for the IT area do not have a clear idea of ​​what their lives will be like after adopting the cloud as an IT infrastructure. There is a certain air of mystery and impotence in the face of the fact that the servers are no longer within physical reach and that we can no longer easily connect to physical consoles, let alone press the on/off button. However, the rewards come in many forms and the positive aspects of the cloud manifest themselves in unexpected ways for first-timers.

Let's put ourselves for a moment in the life of Pedro, IT manager of a company with 500 employees, who recently migrated a legacy workload to the cloud and now faces the first challenges in this environment. Pedro is a representative of the many market professionals who are faced with a new world to be explored and, gradually, begin to get used to the facilities of the cloud.

Early in the morning, Pedro is faced with a problem recently discovered by his software supplier, which will require a version upgrade. Pedro knows that the problem is serious and needs to upgrade. However, tired of finding surprises in software patches, he suspects that if he does the procedure, he could leave users in the lurch for a few hours, chasing corrections for newly found problems. Not to mention the hours worked at dawn to minimize the impact of system unavailability during the upgrade.

Analyzing the situation better, Pedro realizes that none of this is necessary anymore. It can quickly create a copy of the image that the software server generates and also has a copy of the database, automatically updated overnight.

In a few minutes, Pedro can start up an environment identical to that of productions in virtual machines , which will be used for just a few hours and which will cost him little. The IT manager can still ask his technical team to perform the upgrade in this test environment, validate all changes and move on only when everything is perfect. And most interestingly, this work can be done throughout the day, without any impact to the production environment.

During the process of testing the new software, the team receives a high disk usage alarm generated by the cloud itself. The thresholds he set for database server occupancy were reached faster than expected, particularly as the increased performance of the cloud system allowed more monitoring information to be stored. Expanding a disk on your own server is a delicate process, especially when the disk is already available. It would be a few weeks process.

However, with the managed database service the procedure is different. Pedro realizes that he can schedule a maintenance window, being able to automatically increase the size of his database without causing any disruption to the system, since he has already chosen a high availability operating mode. It all boils down to setting the window to some convenient time and determining the new database size.

Already in the middle of the afternoon, an operator notices that the Windows server he was accessing presents an inexplicable loss of performance. Soon afterwards, he receives an alert from the cloud administration, informing him that this same server is suffering a port scan .

When prompted, Pedro decides to run a tool from the cloud itself to check whether all the servers have firewall rules adhering to the security and discovers that this server is open to the world. Some contributor inadvertently removed the default protection filters. From the logs he discovers who the collaborator is and then applies the rule that prevents all users with the same level of privilege from performing the same removal.

At the end of the day, Pedro is invited by his director to a meeting in which a new supplier will present a tool that promises to increase the productivity of a production line by up to 30%. Throughout the conversation, it is discovered that you can test the tool, but for that, you will need to make several servers available and you will have to connect with VPNs and access the manufacturer's own Web services.

In addition, he realizes that he can test with his own database and validate the entire integration through an IPaaS (Integration Platform) that connects his software to the Web service through ready-made modules. Of course, if you only had the company's hardware, this test would never be possible. Thanks to the cloud, creating this environment is a matter of a few hours. In addition, Pedro can take a copy of his database and test the tool as it would effectively work in his company. Integration immediate and with that it removes barriers to the adoption of new tools and minimizes acquisition risks, exhaustively testing what you are going to buy.

The infrastructure paradigm shift radically affected Pedro's life, who now spends much less time on infrastructure. His current task is just to choose what he needs and click on the correct buttons. He knows that today his team will no longer need to waste endless hours configuring and maintaining servers, storage , routers and firewalls . His team can focus more on helping other areas of the company identify tools that increase productivity and thereby ensure that they are well used. With all this, even Pedro's nights became more peaceful.

Sky.One Sky.One company's pains and needs to prepare a complete project from data migration to support. In this way, the focus is on working on legacy applications, that is, those that have not yet migrated their technology to the cloud. Such applications are present in 90% of small and medium-sized companies. Therefore, we developed the Auto.Sky and provided technical knowledge through a team of more than 150 highly qualified professionals when it comes to cloud computing. Interested? Click here to find out how we can help you on this journey!