Governance of your Azure cloud platforms by Castelis

Your Azure cloud governance is part of your cloud and IT infrastructure management strategy. To simplify the management process and the implementation of a proper cloud governance strategy, Microsoft Azure offers many services and tools that work together to provide complete coverage of management of your IT in the cloud.

No single service completely fulfills the requirements of a particular business area: each is performed by several services working together. Some services, such as Application Insights, provide targeted monitoring functionality for web applications. Others, such as Azure Monitor logs, store management data for other services.

What management areas should you implement for your Azure cloud governance ? And what solution should you implement to cover all of these areas ?

 

 

Systems configuration

Configuring systems in Azure involves designing, deploying, and maintaining the resources needed to build or upgrade your cloud systems. Microsoft Azure allows you to automate these tasks to eliminate redundancy, minimize workload and therefore management time, and increase accuracy and efficiency.

Using Runbook, you can manage your IT infrastructures using descriptive scripts and taking advantage of automation or versioning mechanisms. This makes it much easier to upgrade and update systems, which results in greater stability over time.

To learn more about the IaaC tools offered by Azure, here is more information on Azure Automation features.

 

Migration to the Azure cloud

Migrating resources to the cloud must be a comprehensive and long-term approach. For this reason, the cloud migration strategy is based on an exhaustive mapping of the information system concerned.

Each application domain and each system is evaluated according to a qualification methodology. This allows us to validate the relevance of the approach and the preferred migration path.

Castelis relies on the 6R methodology to build the migration roadmap of your information system and on the tools provided by Azure to accelerate the migration of candidate domains. Our teams are also able to manage the upgrade of your legacy applications.

As part of a Rehost strategy, the solutions Azure Migrate and Azure Migration Database Service enable faster and more reliable deployment on the Azure cloud.

 

Monitoring

Monitoring is the act of collecting and analyzing data to audit the performance, integrity and availability of your resources. An effective monitoring strategy for your Azure cloud helps you understand how your information system components are performing and increases its availability.

Notifications from monitoring tools help you to keep your systems under control, perform proactive maintenance, and evaluate the overall performance of your IT Cloud over time for continuous improvement.

To learn more about the monitoring tools available on the Azure platform, discover the range of services offered by Azure Monitor.

 

Azure Cloud Governance

Implementing an Azure governance strategy is essential for the proper management of your resources. It is about implementing mechanisms and processes to maintain control of the underlying Azure applications and resources based on the strategic priorities of the business.

Governance in Azure is mainly based on two services. On the one hand, Azure Policy allows you to create, assign and manage policy definitions to apply rules for your resources according to the standards you have defined for your company. On the other hand, Azure Cost Management allows you to track resource consumption in order to optimize the ROI of your cloud strategy in the context of your FinOps policy.

Castelis helps you to make the most of these tools but also to increase their power with BI reporting tools mixing Azure data and your business data (projects, applications, accounting, ERP …).

 

Securing your cloud infrastructure

Azure provides a centralized platform for managing the security of your resources and data. It allows you to focus on securing your application domains. The Azure service provides security updates and leverages the latest features to continuously optimize the security of your IT infrastructure.

By adding the capabilities of the solution Azure Security Center and third-party security tools offered by Castelis (Qualys, Cloudflare …), You have a proven foundation to invest in your cloud deployment with confidence.

 

 

Availability and performance of your web applications

Ensuring the highest availability for your applications and data is our daily concern. This protection is provided by Azure backup services to ensure the continuity of your resources and data.

Protection means keeping your applications and data available, even in the event of outages beyond your control. This protection is provided by two services. Azure Backup allows backup and recovery of your data, in the cloud or locally. Azure Site Recovery provides business continuity and immediate disaster recovery.

Castelis, as a Microsoft Azure Gold Partner, takes care of the governance of your Azure cloud. Our cloud and IT security experts audit your infrastructure; design the right cloud migration strategy; leverage the right development tools to integrate all your tools; ensure the security of your cloud computing solutions; and guarantee reactive technical support. Thus, you benefit from an Azure cloud designed for the performance and scalability of your tools, from the management of your costs in a FinOps approach, or from a particular attention paid to IT security.

 

Need more information about Azure cloud governance services or specific support to manage your IT ?

Contact us directly, our team is at your disposal.