Safeguard Azure against organic growth: Prevent cloud sprawl, reduce risk, and maximise performance

A shift to cloud native platforms and services fortifies your competitive edge to attract and retain clients. It’s a massive opportunity, which is why the cloud services market is on a growth trajectory unlike any other industry. Today, over half (56%) of organisations worldwide use Microsoft Azure, with the marketplace containing 16,000 products and services.

However, the ease with which developers can provision new apps has led to growing complexity and cloud sprawl with redundant, over-engineered or unused cloud infrastructure. This creates several issues, which organisations must get on top of to retain their edge.

Combining manual and automated processes weakens cloud deployments

When cloud environments rely on a blend of manual and automated processes, they often develop hidden risks, vulnerabilities, and weak points. These deployments tend to lack standardisation and consistency, which can lead to significant management overhead and increased costs. Additionally, any investment in automation risks becoming quickly obsolete, as manual changes invalidate the deployment code and erode the value of automation efforts.

Building with partial automation but introducing manual modifications undermines the integrity of the deployment code, making it unreliable for future updates or scaling efforts. For automation to deliver its full potential, it’s essential to commit fully—aim to be “all in” on automation from the start.

Over provisioning leads to a lack of optimisation

When cloud environments become bloated with unnecessary resources and inefficiencies, it creates resource management challenges due to over/under use.

Over provision and you limit cloud agility. To ensure they can meet peak demand, the average organisation will over provision their cloud environments by a third.

Under provision, and it can result in performance issues, because you’ll struggle to scale the platform to handle varying workloads.

To prevent this, start by right-sizing your environment according to actual usage – and then continually monitor and optimise. Regular reviews help you to adjust your cloud provision, so you only pay for what you need. A good resource to leverage is the Azure Well-Architected Framework, which is proven to lower the three-year cost of operations by 24%.

To further enhance your Azure environment, consider our BlakYaks Vitals Check, a rapid health assessment service designed to identify significant weaknesses in your existing Azure deployments. This comprehensive evaluation covers security, resilience, operations, and cost management, with a primary focus on Azure landing zones. An optional Kubernetes assessment is also available when relevant.

Organic growth increases technical debt

Organic growth often results in unplanned technical debt, fragmented systems and overly complex architectures that are difficult to manage.

One survey of CIOs discovered that 20-40% of their budget is spent simply managing legacy systems. While software developers spend a third of their time on tech debt maintenance. It diverts precious resources away from innovation and creates security vulnerabilities - nearly half of organisations (48%) have experienced a cybersecurity incident due to legacy systems.

To steer clear of problems, schedule regular architectural reviews. Over time your business changes shape. To keep pace with that change, you need to assess which applications and services should be decommissioned, those you can move ‘as-is’, and others that require some investment before upgrading to cloud-native. By proactively managing your tech debt, you boost platform agility and performance to give your modernisation efforts the best chance of success.

Misconfigurations create security risks

A significant challenge that plagues organisations is how to ensure a robust security and compliance posture across Azure environments. The lack of security/coding standards can lead to misconfigurations, which expose the platform to security breaches and data leaks. The average organisation has 351 exploitable attack paths and face 59 data security incidents each year.

As well as financial losses and regulatory penalties, the Information Commissioner has warned organisations of reputational damage - 20% of people would definitely stop dealing with a company following a breach, while a further 57% would consider withdrawing their business.

To keep this from happening, security considerations must remain high on your agenda. In particular, automated security and compliance monitoring will ensure standards are defined and adhered to – flagging up any deviations or security vulnerabilities, so action can be taken swiftly. One of the easiest ways to implement automated security and compliance monitoring across your Azure environments is through Azure Policy and Azure Security Center.

⊳ Read more about our approach to Security

Limited cloud expertise halts innovation

Evolving cloud technologies create the need for continuous training. But when customer teams are short on capacity, it’s hard to find time to dedicate to upskilling and staff development. This leaves many organisations unable handle the growing demands of managing and scaling cloud environments.

As well as errors and misconfigurations, limited knowledge restricts a business’s ability to innovate and leverage advanced Azure features and services. Additionally, knowing how to resolve complex issues in an organically grown platform is far more challenging. As a result, only 20-30% of industries use cloud applications regularly and at scale.

To avert this scenario, think about how you can streamline routine tasks – like support and maintenance – using standardised automated processes (that are well documented), as well as making time to develop Azure automation excellence. When combined, these initiatives help to free your people from just keeping the lights on and business-as-usual tasks, so they have time to invest in training and learning how to modernise their platforms.

Shift to cloud native quicker with our Azure Accelerator Packs

For clients wanting to avoid the potential pitfalls associated with organic Azure growth, we offer a portfolio of innovative pre-engineered, pre-coded, and pre-tested platforms’ solutions, known as Azure Accelerator Packs.

These enterprise-grade Azure platforms are proven to ensure best practices in cloud management, reduce the risk of misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities, streamline deployments, enhance response times, and empower internal teams to focus on strategic initiatives - ultimately leading you to a more efficient and effective cloud infrastructure.

If you’d like to discover how our Accelerator Packs can benefit your business, let’s chat.