Cloud Strategies and Authentication Methodologies

 

Making the Cloud Work for IT

Like most forward thinking IT teams, we are always looking for better ways to connect people with the data, tools, and services they need.

“Do more with less” is a phrase no IT leader loves to hear, but it is a reality in many organizations. After more than 25 years working in startups, I have learned that efficiency is not simply about reducing headcount or spending less. It is about using automation to handle repetitive work while protecting the reliability, security, and integrity of the systems the business depends on.

Moving toward the cloud

Many organizations have adopted cloud services for systems that once had to be managed on site. Ten years ago, I was hesitant about that idea.

Why hand over control of a system to someone else? Hosting a service internally meant control over the hardware, software, configuration, management, and customization. Giving that up felt risky.

My first real experience with cloud services was hosted Exchange, before Office 365 became widely available. As a systems administrator, the idea of no longer managing an email platform myself was uncomfortable at first. I worried that my skills would become less relevant.

Instead, it gave me room to focus on more important work.

Exchange is a complex system to operate well. By using a hosted service, I no longer had to spend as much time on day to day maintenance, disaster recovery planning, and troubleshooting every technical issue. When a problem occurred, the provider became the first level of support.

That freed me and my team to focus more on the company’s needs, rather than spending all of our time maintaining the underlying tools.

The value of cloud services

Today, cloud strategy is common across many organizations. Cloud services can take critical systems that might otherwise require several administrators and make them easier to manage at scale.

For example, our Exchange environment supports roughly 375 active email accounts and uses more than 3.3 TB of storage. It serves a global community of sales, services, and support employees, with availability close to 99.99 percent.

Running that same environment on site would require substantial hardware, dedicated storage, replication to a secondary location, backup and recovery systems, and likely one or more full time administrators.

Cloud services do not eliminate responsibility, but they can reduce the operational burden and allow IT teams to focus their time where it matters most.

Too many passwords

The move to cloud services also creates a challenge. Each platform often comes with its own login, password, and user management process.

As companies adopt more applications, this quickly becomes difficult for employees and IT teams alike. People have more passwords to remember. New hires need accounts in multiple systems. When someone leaves, IT needs to make sure access is removed everywhere.

Single sign on platforms such as Okta and OneLogin help solve this problem. They allow companies to use one identity system across multiple services, including Atlassian, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, NetSuite, Dynamics 365, and many others.

At Virtana, we use Okta to support authentication, multi factor authentication, and automated user provisioning and deprovisioning. This reduces the likelihood of manual errors and makes it easier to manage access consistently.

We have deployed this approach across more than 20 services used by the company. When we evaluate a new platform, such as SurveyMonkey or Monday.com, one of our first questions is whether it supports SAML and can integrate with our single sign on environment.

The goal is simple: make access easier for employees while keeping company systems secure.

Monitoring the cloud

As cloud environments grow, visibility becomes just as important as access management.

Virtana’s acquisition of Metricly added cloud monitoring capabilities for services such as AWS. The platform became part of our broader CloudWisdom offering and helps organizations understand how their cloud infrastructure is performing.

One of the most valuable capabilities is cost optimization. It is one thing to know that AWS cost $50,000 in a given month. It is much more useful to understand what drove that cost and where changes could reduce spending without affecting performance.

Those savings can be reinvested in innovation, infrastructure, or people.

Cloud services are not a replacement for thoughtful IT leadership. They are a way to spend less time maintaining routine systems and more time helping the business move forward.