While the advantages of cloud environments are evident–speed of scale, agility and speed of deployment — these new IT infrastructures present cloud environments a variety of challenges that must be overcome in order to reap their rewards. The challenges are different in severity depending on the industry, the infrastructure and long-term goals of an organization. But, they can include data and app governance security, performance, as well as data issues.

The most difficult aspect of cloud environments is achieving the desired level of elasticity where the resources allocated to applications are in perfect alignment with demand. In a perfect scenario, the resources will be allocated without affecting the speed of application and businesses would only pay for the resources they use. However, the reality is that a lot of cloud platforms aren’t nimble enough to handle the demands of peak load which causes delays and reduces responsiveness of applications.

Another issue is making sure that the appropriate policies are in place to address compliance, security and governance concerns. This requires policies in line with regulatory frameworks and requirements, including standards for data handling and storage as well as security measures such as logging, monitoring and security detection, as well as access controls.

Additionally, the absence of a defined procedure could lead to inefficient and chaotic cloud resource management and provisioning that could result in data breaches and compliance violations. To tackle this issue, teams can define approval workflows and budgetary control to ensure that they are using resources according to best practices and not wasting money on unused capacity.

Unoptimized development in CDEs can also be prevented by including cloud cost visibility into existing dashboards and identifying waste due to bloated permissions or regional misconfigurations. In addition, companies should create budgets that limit the monthly cost of infrastructure development without limiting productivity.