How to optimize the cloud with WAF

After organizations have “lived” in the cloud for a while, they start gaining an understanding of how their cloud footprint seemingly endlessly evolves over time. How do you continuously work with security, reliability, and efficiency of your cloud infrastructure and be cost efficient at the same time? One broad answer is the Well Architected Framework, or WAF for short.

When companies start using the cloud, the first thing that strikes them is often how easy it is to get started. The pitfall, meanwhile, is that a lot of inexperienced users set up a lot of services but never fully learn how to leverage them to their full potential. This ends up being costly, inefficient, and often, non-compliant and unsecure.

Human error, suboptimal design, and failure to think long-term should not only be accepted as reality, but it should also be accepted as common occurrence. The alternative is slowing down deployment with lengthy QA processes, which kills one of the major gains from cloud, speed. When you eventually come to understand that there is no chance that you are running a fully optimized cloud environment and that the situation will escalate if you do nothing, you start investing in continuous cloud optimization.

Companies whose cloud infrastructure is built and maintained according to the pillars of WAF benefit from more efficient, resilient, secure, reliable, and high-performance cloud operations.

Download the WAF guide

How is that done?

Both Amazon and Microsoft have worked with thousands of companies in a wide variety of industries and settings all over the world, analyzing and optimizing their cloud architectures. In doing so, they have been able to identify a series of criteria that successful cloud architecture plans have in common. They have used this experience to create a best practice known as WAF.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is based around six common criteria – or pillars – that anyone building or operating a cloud infrastructure should consider:

Operational excellence

workloads/platforms should be easy to operate, support the developers, give good insights, and have continuous improvements of surrounding processes.

Security

ensuring that confidentiality measures are in place and that the integrity of information, systems, and assets are protected.

Reliability

distributed system design, preventing and quickly recovering from failures.

Performance efficiency

selecting, using, right sizing and deploying resources efficiently to meet performance needs.

Cost optimization

controlling the way money is spent, build cost effective.

Sustainability

maximizing resource efficiency and reducing waste.

In an ideal world, all the pillars should be 100% to achieve the desired goal of business outcomes. You would stop guessing your capacity needs and instead build and deploy faster, lower or mitigate risks, make informed decisions, and learn while benefitting from AWS best practices.

Not an easy task

However, the reality is not quite as straightforward. The truth is that boosting one pillar may cause a negative knock-on effect on another. For example, implementing a high level of security may result in latency, which, in turn has a negative impact on the user experience, thus reducing performance efficiency. Meanwhile, having an extremely user-friendly, easy-to-operate cloud infrastructure may require bypassing one or two security steps, thus leaving it open to hackers.

Download the WAF guide

How to optimize your infrastructure

It’s often helpful to enlist a cloud MSP because of the broad and deep level of competency needed to understand a cloud environment. Optimization work can be complex and might require a multiskilled team to gain the best results.

At Basefarm, we propose improvements during the gap analysis. When taking a first look at a cloud setup we often discover:

Underutilization of resources – services have been paid for but are not being used correctly
Unsecure access management – many employees have more security access than they should have.
Unsecure data storage – the storage of sensitive and confidential data is not as secure as it should be.
Non-compliant ways of setting up infrastructure – they are not working in accordance with the latest regulations and legal requirements; but have too much equipment up and running, which is both costly and inefficient.

By speaking to our customers and doing a Business Impact Analysis (BIA), Basefarm can obtain an in-depth understanding of their business requirements. We look at which of their assets are most prioritized and most critical, in order create a design wherein the six pillars are maximized.

We prepare the customer by asking questions like, what needs to be most secure, what requires the greatest performance efficiency, what are the compliance needs in the markets where they operate, where is it possible to reduce costs without compromising on security or performance, and so on. This is done to find the optimal outcome for every individual customer’s unique set of business requirements. Everything is then designed and implemented in a way that is future proof and can easily be adapted for changing needs or scaled up as and when required.

A secure investment

At first glance, WAF may seem like a considerable investment. However, one thing is clear: without WAF, the cloud tends to end up costing more and delivering less than it should do. However, using it correctly, will not only allow you to reduce your long-term costs but also to build a cloud infrastructure that is more flexible, more secure, and more agile than ever before.

With our cutting-edge cloud expertise, Basefarm has the experience needed to help you get the most out of cloud and ensure that you are secure, compliant, and efficient, in accordance with the WAF best practices.