Operational Resilience in the Cloud: Best Practices
Businesses increasingly rely on cloud platforms to host, manage, and secure their applications and data. However, while cloud infrastructure simplifies scalability and innovation, maintaining this environment under increasing levels of change is critical.
A resilient cloud environment will protect against security threats and failure scenarios, optimise performance, and manage costs effectively. In the era of stringent regulatory frameworks, like the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), resilience management is key to addressing operational and regulatory demands.
In this blog we explore why focusing on resilience in the Cloud is essential, the challenges organisations face, and how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and continuous resilience management play a vital role in ensuring a well-maintained cloud platform.
Why Resilience Matters for Cloud Platforms
Operational resilience refers to an organisation's ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations. In the context of cloud computing, this means ensuring that cloud-based services remain available, secure, and efficient, even when facing incidents like service failures, cyber-attacks, or natural disasters.
1. Security
Without proper oversight, cloud-based IT platforms can leave the door open to serious risks. Outdated or poorly set-up infrastructure can leave you vulnerable; misconfigured identity and access policies might let the wrong people in, and insecure components — like services with unintended public-facing entry points or weak encryption — can lead to data breaches. In short, staying on top of security is non-negotiable.
2. compliance
In sectors like healthcare, finance, or government, compliance requirements can be extremely strict — think HIPAA, GDPR, and DORA. A cloud platform needs to meet these regulations by sticking to operational resilience best practices, following rules on data protection and service continuity, and having solid monitoring and reporting systems in place. It’s not just about ticking boxes; it’s about building trust and avoiding costly penalties.
3. PERFORMANCE
Performance problems can disrupt your business, frustrate customers, and hit your bottom line. Issues like outdated resources, network latency, and poorly sized instances can cause slowdowns and inefficiencies. Keeping your cloud platform running smoothly even under failure scenarios is essential to keep customers happy and avoid unnecessary disruptions.
4. COST MANAGEMENT
Cloud costs can get out of hand if you’re not careful. Idle or underused resources, detached storage, over-provisioned virtual machines, and inefficient scaling policies (among many cost traps) can all drive up expenses unnecessarily. Staying on top of resource allocation and scaling policies can save you from unpleasant billing surprises.
Challenges in Maintaining Resilient Cloud Environments
Maintaining operational resilience in the cloud is an ongoing journey rather than a one-time task. The dynamic nature of cloud platforms — where frequent updates, evolving technologies, and shifting threat landscapes are the norm — poses significant challenges for organisations striving to ensure seamless operations.
Without a proactive approach to resilience, businesses risk security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and compliance failures, which can disrupt operations and damage customer trust.
In this section, we explore the key obstacles organisations face in building and sustaining resilient cloud environments and how these challenges demand innovative strategies and solutions.
COMPLEXITY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURES
For many organisations adopting a “move-to-cloud” strategy, the journey often involves juggling both on-premises and cloud-based solutions. This hybrid setup can make configuration management feel like a balancing act, especially when you’re trying to ensure everything works seamlessly together.
FREQUENT CHANGES
The cloud is fast-paced by design, with frequent, iterative deployments being the norm. While this agility is great for innovation, it also increases the risk of configuration drift—where changes over time create inconsistencies that can leave you open to vulnerabilities
MANUAL OVERSIGHT
Relying on traditional IT management practices in a cloud environment can be a real challenge. Manual processes are not only time-consuming but also prone to human error, making them unsustainable as your cloud environment scales.
EVOLVING THREAT LANDSCAPE
Cyber threats aren’t static—they’re constantly evolving. This means organisations must stay on their toes, regularly updating their security strategies to keep up with emerging risks and protect their cloud environments.
Navigating these challenges requires careful planning, automation where possible, and a proactive approach to both management and security.
The Role of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows organisations to define, provision, and manage their infrastructure using code. Tools like Terraform enable teams to standardise their cloud setups, bringing a host of advantages:
🗹 Consistency Across Environments
IaC ensures that development, staging, and production environments are configured identically. This consistency significantly reduces misconfigurations and errors, leading to smoother deployments.
🗹 Version Control and Auditing
Infrastructure changes are tracked through version control systems like Git, providing a clear history of modifications. This enables easy rollback and enhances traceability for auditing purposes.
🗹 Faster Deployments
IaC allows infrastructure to be provisioned or updated in minutes rather than hours, reducing downtime and enabling teams to respond quickly to changing requirements.
🗹 Reduced Configuration Drift
Automated deployment pipelines powered by IaC keep environments aligned with their intended states, eliminating configuration drift and ensuring stability over time.
By leveraging IaC, organisations can streamline operations, improve reliability, and adopt a more agile approach to infrastructure management. Read more about BlakYaks’ approach to managing large-scale cloud infrastructure platforms with code here.
The Importance of Resilience Management
While IaC simplifies infrastructure provisioning, maintaining a healthy and resilient cloud environment requires continuous oversight and proactive management.
Resilience management ensures the cloud operates smoothly and includes several key practices:
Design Compliance Monitoring
Continuously evaluating adherence to architectural guidelines ensures that the cloud environment remains aligned with best practices.
Configuration Drift Management
Monitoring for and addressing deviations from intended configurations helps maintain system stability and security.
Policy Enforcement and Reporting
Ensuring compliance with operational policies through monitoring and reporting minimises risk and supports governance.
End-of-Life (EOL) Management
Proactively identifying and addressing deprecated services prevents reliance on outdated technologies that could compromise operations.
Platform Risk Monitoring
Keeping an eye on emerging risks — such as service deprecations or newly discovered vulnerabilities — enables early mitigation.
Recovery Readiness
Preparing for and testing failure scenarios ensures that systems can recover quickly and effectively in the event of an incident.
Cost Optimisation
Analysing resource usage to identify underutilised, over-provisioned, or misconfigured resources helps control costs and improve efficiency.
A robust resilience management strategy ensures that cloud environments remain secure, efficient, and ready to handle the unexpected, all while keeping costs under control.
Best Practices for Maintaining Resilience
Building and maintaining resilience in cloud environments requires a proactive approach and adherence to key best practices.
Here’s how organisations can ensure their cloud infrastructure stays robust and reliable:
Adopt a DevOps Mindset
Integrate Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automated health checks into your DevOps pipelines. This approach enables the continuous delivery of secure and high-performing infrastructure through repeatable and thoroughly tested configurations, ensuring resilience is baked into every stage of the process.
Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Limit the ability to make changes to authorised users and services only. This reduces the chances of accidental or malicious misconfigurations that could compromise your environment.
Leverage Best Practice Insights
Take advantage of proprietary and open-source tools to run best practice checks on your cloud environments. These resources provide valuable guidance for optimising and securing your setup.
Eliminate Single Points of Failure
Design redundancy and failover strategies into your architecture where appropriate and feasible. This ensures that your systems can continue to operate even if single or multiple critical components fail.
Continuously Test Recovery Scenarios
Disaster recovery plans need to be more than just theoretical. Regularly test these plans to ensure they work in practice and keep them updated to reflect current business needs and regulatory requirements.
Plan for Service Deprecation
Stay informed about roadmap and lifecycle updates for the services you use. Proactively planning for service deprecation avoids last-minute scrambles to replace outdated technology.
Conduct Regular Reviews
Even with automation in place, periodic reviews are essential. They allow you to validate assumptions, refine configurations, and incorporate new requirements as your environment evolves.
By following these practices, organisations can strengthen their cloud resilience, minimise risks, and maintain operational continuity in a rapidly changing landscape.
Closing thoughts
Achieving operational resilience in the cloud is no longer a 'nice-to-have' — it is a necessity for businesses looking to safeguard against disruptions, maintain compliance, and optimise performance. With the growing complexity of cloud environments and the ever-evolving threat landscape, a proactive, well-structured approach is essential.
By adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automating resilience management, and adhering to best practices, organisations can build a cloud platform that not only withstands unforeseen challenges but also thrives in them. Resilient cloud operations ultimately enable businesses to deliver uninterrupted services, maintain regulatory compliance, and optimise costs — all critical factors for long-term success.
To stay ahead… Azure Vitals Check
Our engineering team has developed ‘Azure Vitals Check’, a tool that enables us to provide a thorough assessment of Azure environments within 2-3 hours and delivers comprehensive reports within 72 hours.
The assessment requires minimal customer input; our specialists complete the evaluation and share the reports with your team, offering essential insights for future Azure operational strategies and planning.
We regularly use this tool in our managed service environments through our Specialist Operations team to (re)evaluate various aspects of their platforms, including operational resilience, security, and cost risks. The tool highlights key impacts and critical remediation needs, ensuring that platform operations remain resilient and well-monitored.
If you would like to learn more about how our team uses Azure Vitals Check to maintain resilient operations for our customers, please contact us for more information.
