In this blog post, we’ll discuss the various components of cloud costs, the trends driving them, and offer tips to help you make the most of your cloud investments.

The cost of cloud

Cloud costs include all of the expenses incurred by an organization for utilizing cloud computing services. These expenditures include various factors and can be difficult to manage due to frequently-changing components and industry dynamics.

While potential cost savings can be a powerful lure for organizations looking to migrate to the cloud, many businesses find themselves unprepared for the actual costs and ongoing expense of cloud operations. 

Let’s face it, cloud migration is a huge undertaking, but also the start of a new way of working with new opportunities. For more on cloud migration for businesses, read our popular post What is Cloud Migration? Strategy, Processes, Benefits & Risks.

Understanding the components of cloud costs

Cloud costs can seem complex and overwhelming, but breaking them down into their various components can help simplify the concept:

Infrastructure

This includes the servers, storage, and networking required to run cloud services. Organizations need to consider the amount of resources they require and choose the appropriate level of infrastructure to meet their business needs.

Data transfers

There may be charges associated with transferring data between your systems and the cloud provider. Understanding the cost structure and optimizing data transfers can help minimize these expenses.

Software licensing

These fees are also a part of cloud costs, especially when utilizing specialized software applications hosted on the cloud. Businesses should consider the licensing models and any associated fees when evaluating the cost of cloud services.

Overall, understanding the components of cloud costs allows businesses to make informed decisions about their cloud investments. By analyzing these factors and optimizing resource utilization, companies can effectively manage their cloud expenses and maximize the value they receive from their cloud services.

Factors affecting cloud spend

When it comes to cloud spend, there are several factors that can influence how much a business will pay. These factors can vary depending on the specific needs and requirements of the business, as well as the industry it operates in.

Company size

One of the key factors that impacts cloud spend is the type and amount of resources used. Different cloud services offer various pricing models, and the more resources a business utilizes, the higher the cost will be. So, bigger organizations that utilize large amounts of storage or multiple cloud-based applications will likely have higher cloud costs compared to those with lower resource demands.

Organizations of any size can accelerate their cloud transformation with a tailored workforce upskilling strategy from Cloud Academy. Our content, hands-on labs, and certification paths across multiple cloud services can help you to resolve skill gaps within your team and prepare them for your business cloud future. Contact us to learn more.

Usage time

The duration of usage is another factor to consider. Cloud providers often charge based on usage time. Businesses that require continuous access to cloud resources may have higher costs compared to those that only need sporadic usage. 

Hidden egress fees

While most cloud providers allow free data uploads to their infrastructure, downloading or even moving data from cloud storage comes at a cost. These fees, or “egress” charges are one of the hidden costs of cloud computing, and they can quickly add up.

Many businesses don’t account for egress fees when calculating their cloud computing expenses, and end up paying much more than they anticipated, which may inhibit their ability to move between cloud environments.

Cloud providers

The specific cloud provider can also impact cloud spend. Different providers have different pricing structures and rates, so it’s important for IT decision makers to carefully evaluate and compare options to find the most cost-effective solution to meet their needs.

By understanding these factors and considering them in cloud investment decisions, businesses can better manage and optimize their cloud costs.

Private vs. public cloud spend

One of the key decisions that organizations face when it comes to cloud computing is whether to opt for a private or public cloud. This decision can significantly impact cloud spend. 

Advantages and disadvantages of private cloud

Private clouds are cloud environments that are dedicated to a single organization. They offer enhanced security, control, and customization, which can be particularly important for industries with strict regulatory requirements or sensitive data. 

However, setting up and maintaining a private cloud can be costly. Companies need to invest in the infrastructure, hardware, and maintenance, which as you guessed it, can quickly add up. On top of that, businesses will need to hire skilled professionals to manage the private cloud, adding another layer of expense.

Advantages and disadvantages of public cloud

Public clouds, offered by major providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, offer a more cost-effective option. These providers have already made the necessary investments in infrastructure, allowing businesses to pay only for the resources they need and use. Public clouds also offer scalability, meaning businesses can easily increase or decrease their resource usage as needed, further optimizing costs.

While the majority of public cloud services offered by any leading vendor are secure, misuse of the infrastructure contracted by another company can put your business at risk, a successful attack on the main server opens a breach for each client’s system. For industries with high data security demands, public cloud may not be a viable option.

Cloud downtime, which occurs when the service is not working or unavailable due to unexpected outages, updating, or maintenance activities is another disadvantage of the public cloud. While the occurrence is rare, it is extremely costly. On average downtime can cost a user upwards of $100,000/hour.

Cloud spend by industry

For most industries, cloud spending has surged as a strategic investment. While Information Technology may have been the earliest adopter of cloud computing, and quite naturally spend more revenue on cloud-based tech, many other industries have caught on to the advantages of cloud. These include the finance, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors.

% Cloud spend by industry

Cloud spend by country

The U.S. remains the market leader, accounting for 45% of all cloud service revenues in 2022, and is estimated to spend more than $258 billion on public cloud services in 2023.

The European cloud market, a close second, is expected to reach $650 billion by the year 2032. In the Asia-Pacific region, excluding China, cloud spend is expected to reach $200 billion by 2024.

Gartner experts forecast that worldwide, public cloud spend will top $600 billion by Q4 of 2023.

Trends in cloud spending

New industry adoption

New industries are quickly implementing massive efforts to digitize their operations, experts have referred to it as the ‘cloud shift’. According to Gartner, it is expected that by 2025 more than 50% of enterprise IT spend in key market segments will shift to the cloud. 

FinTech organizations, for example, are leveraging the cloud to improve financial data analysis and optimize backend operations such as invoice, payment, crypto, and customer management.  This trend is expected to continue as more companies within these industries recognize the potential of cloud tech.

Multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies

Businesses are recognizing that a one-size-fits-all approach may not be suitable for their specific needs. Instead, they are adopting multiple cloud providers or combining private and public clouds to optimize costs and improve performance. This allows businesses to leverage the strengths of different cloud platforms and create a more robust and flexible infrastructure.

Cost optimization and resource utilization

As companies become more comfortable with cloud technologies, they are shifting their focus to ensuring they are getting the most value from their cloud investments. This involves monitoring usage patterns, optimizing resource allocation, and identifying areas for cost reduction. By doing so, businesses can not only optimize their cloud spending but also gain a competitive edge in their respective industries.

Tools and best practices for managing cloud costs

When it comes to managing cloud costs, there are a variety of tools and best practices that can help businesses optimize their spending. Here are some tools and practices that IT leaders should consider:

1. Cloud Cost Management Tools: There are several cloud cost management tools available in the market that can provide valuable insights into spending patterns, track and forecast costs, and even offer recommendations for cost optimization. These tools can help businesses gain visibility into their cloud costs and make informed decisions about resource allocation.

2. Usage Monitoring and Optimization: Regularly monitoring and analyzing resource usage can help identify areas of inefficiency and optimize resource allocation. By understanding which resources are being underutilized or over-provisioned, businesses can make adjustments to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

3. Cost Allocation Tags: Implementing cost allocation tags can help businesses assign costs to specific departments, projects, or teams. This level of granularity provides greater visibility into spending patterns and enables businesses to identify areas of high cost. With this information, they can take steps to optimize or reduce expenses.

4. Cloud Cost Governance: Establishing cloud cost governance practices can help businesses manage and control their cloud costs effectively. This involves setting clear cost management policies, defining budget thresholds, and implementing approval processes for resource provisioning.

5. Right-sizing Resources: Ensuring that cloud resources are properly sized to match the actual workload can help optimize costs. By regularly reviewing resource utilization and adjusting the size of instances or storage as needed, businesses can avoid over-provisioning and reduce unnecessary expenses.

By understanding the various components that make up the overall cost of cloud, and implementing cost management tools and the right strategies, IT leaders can optimize their cloud spending and allocate resources more effectively, ultimately achieving their goals while staying within budget.

To learn more about cloud academy and how we can help you along your cloud journey, contact us for more information or to schedule a demo.

The post Navigating Cloud Costs: Key Factors and Trends for Businesses appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Let’s start our discussion by setting a foundation of what microservices are. Microservices are a way of breaking large software projects into loosely coupled modules, which communicate with each other through simple Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Microservices have become increasingly popular over the past few years. They are an example of the modular architectural style, based on the philosophy of breaking large software projects into smaller, independent, and loosely coupled parts, which has gained prominence among developers for its dynamic and agile qualities in API management and execution of highly defined and discrete tasks.

Simply stated, microservices are really nothing more than another architectural solution for designing complex – mostly web-based – applications. Microservices have gained prominence as an evolution from SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), an approach that was designed to overcome the disadvantages of traditional monolithic architectures. In this blog post, we’ll explore the evolution of development from monolithic architectures toward microservices and its underlying justifications, as well as the pros and cons of microservices.

If you an your team are new to microservices, check out Cloud Academy’s Training Library. From beginner to advanced, the Training Library is loaded with courses to introduce you to microservices or advance your skills on how to build microservices solutions or APIs.

If you’d like to find out how Cloud Academy can be integrated into your company and help you to reach your tech goals, contact us for a free demo. 

The history of microservices

Let’s start with a simple example: Suppose I need to build a classic web application using Java. The first thing I will do is design a Presentation Layer (the user interface), followed by an Application Layer, which handles all of the business logic. This is followed by an Integration Layer to enable loose coupling between various components of the Application Layer. Finally, I will design a Database Layer that will be accessible to the underlying persistence system.

To run the entire application, I will create either a EAR or WAR package and deploy it on an application server (like JBoss, Tomcat, or WebLogic). Because I have packaged everything as an EAR/WAR, my application becomes monolithic in nature, which means that even though we have separate and distinguishable components, all are packaged together.

Here’s an illustration of an example monolithic architecture:

You may already be familiar with the characteristics of monolithic applications depending on your development experience. However, this example also stands to illustrate some of the challenges developers and architects face with this kind of design.

Here are the flaws:

• As the application grows, so does the associated code base, which can overload your development environment each time it loads the application, reducing developer productivity.
• Because the application has been packaged in one EAR/WAR, changing the technology stack of the application becomes a difficult task. With this kind of architecture, refactoring the code base becomes difficult because it’s hard to predict how it will impact application functionality.
• If any single application function or component fails, then the entire application goes down. Imagine a web application with separate functions including payment, login, and history. If a particular function starts consuming more processing power, the entire application’s performance will be compromised.
• Scaling monolithic applications such as the one described in the example can only be accomplished by deploying the same EAR/WAR packages in additional servers, known as horizontal scaling. Each copy of the application in additIonal servers will utilize the same amount of underlying resources, which is inefficient in its design.
• Monolithic architecture impacts both the development and application deployment stage. As applications increase in size, it’s even more important that developers be able to break their applications down into smaller components. Because everything in the monolithic approach is tied together, developers cannot work independently to develop or deploy their own modules and must remain totally dependent on others, increasing overall development time.

With these thoughts in mind, let’s explore the value of microservices and how they can be used to provide the flexibility that’s lacking in monolithic architectures.

The theory behind microservices

One of the major driving forces behind any kind of architectural solution is scalability. Many of our peers in the software architecture and development world have gravitated towards a book called The Art of Scalability. The book’s defining model was the Scale Cube, which describes three dimensions of scaling:

As you can see, the X-axis represents horizontal application scaling (which we have seen is possible even with monolithic architecture), and the Z-axis represents scaling the application by splitting similar things. The Z-axis idea can be better understood by using the sharding concept, where data is partitioned and the application redirects requests to corresponding shards based on user input (as is commonly done with databases).

The Y-axis represents functional decomposition. In this approach, various functions can be seen as independent services. Instead of deploying the entire application once all the components are available, developers can deploy their respective services independently. This not only improves developer time management but also offers greater flexibility to change and redeploy their modules without worrying about the rest of the application’s components. You can see how this is different from the earlier diagram which showed a monolithic design:

Advantages of microservices

The advantages of microservices seem strong enough to have convinced some big enterprise players such as Amazon, Netflix, and eBay to adopt the methodology. Compared to more monolithic design structures, microservices offer:

• Improved fault isolation: Larger applications can remain mostly unaffected by the failure of a single module.
• Eliminate vendor or technology lock-in: Microservices provide the flexibility to try out a new technology stack on an individual service as needed. There won’t be as many dependency concerns and rolling back changes becomes much easier. With less code in play, there is more flexibility.
• Ease of understanding: With added simplicity, developers can better understand the functionality of a service.
• Smaller and faster deployments: Smaller codebases and scope = quicker deployments, which also allow you to start to explore the benefits of Continuous Deployment.
• Scalability: Since your services are separate, you can more easily scale the most needed ones at the appropriate times, as opposed to the whole application. When done correctly, this can impact cost savings.

Disadvantages of microservices

Microservices may be a hot trend, but the architecture does have drawbacks. In general, the main negative of microservices is the complexity that any distributed system has.

Here’s a list of some potential pain areas and other cons associated with microservices designs:

• Communication between services is complex: Since everything is now an independent service, you have to carefully handle requests traveling between your modules. In one such scenario, developers may be forced to write extra code to avoid disruption. Over time, complications will arise when remote calls experience latency.
• More services equals more resources: Multiple databases and transaction management can be painful.
• Global testing is difficult: Testing a microservices-based application can be cumbersome. In a monolithic approach, we would just need to launch our WAR on an application server and ensure its connectivity with the underlying database. With microservices, each dependent service needs to be confirmed before testing can occur.
• Debugging problems can be harder: Each service has its own set of logs to go through. Log, logs, and more logs.
• Deployment challengers: The product may need coordination among multiple services, which may not be as straightforward as deploying a WAR in a container.
• Large vs small product companies: Microservices are great for large companies, but can be slower to implement and too complicated for small companies who need to create and iterate quickly, and don’t want to get bogged down in complex orchestration.

Of course, with the right kind of automation and tools and the properly trained staff, all the above drawbacks can be addressed.

Deployment of microservices

Now that we understand microservices, how are they deployed?

The best way to deploy microservices-based applications is within containers, which are complete virtual operating system environments that provide processes with isolation and dedicated access to underlying hardware resources. One of the biggest names in container solutions right now is Docker, which you can learn more about in our Getting Started Course.

Virtual machines from infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) can also work well for microservices deployments, but relatively lightweight microservices packages may not leverage the whole virtual machine, potentially reducing their cost-effectiveness.

Code deployments can also be completed using an Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGI) bundle. In this use case, all application services will be running under one Java virtual machine, but this method comes with a management and isolation tradeoff.

How to move forward with microservices

As application development trends continue to evolve, the debate between using microservices or leveraging traditional monolithic architectures will only become more pronounced. In the end, developers must do their due diligence and understand what works for their specific use cases.

For smaller companies, starting with a monolithic application can be simpler, faster, and cheaper — and if the product hasn’t gotten too mature, it can still be migrated to microservices at an appropriate time. The huge companies with millions of users are obvious examples of the best use case for microservices, as they need to ensure the uptime, scalability that the added modularity can provide.

A quick video review of the advantage of microservices

Check out our video below where Cloud Academy DevOps lead Jeremy Cook compares monolithic vs microservice architectures. And you can get further info straight from the source: our course on .Net Microservices – Refactors and Design.

Resources to get started with microservices

If you’re looking to use microservices, get started today with these resources on Cloud Academy:

• Build Microservices on AWS Using Serverless: Watch this on-demand webinar to learn how to build event-driven microservices on top of AWS Lambda, Twilio, Amazon Rekognition, and IMDbPy API using the Serverless framework.
• Build RESTful Microservices with AWS Lambda and API Gateway: Get practical experience as you design your own resources structure, add dynamic routing parameters, and develop custom authorizations logic.
• Explore all of our microservices courses in the Cloud Academy Content Library.

To learn more about Cloud Academy’s course offerings and certification programs, contact one of our experts for a free demo.

The post Advantages and Disadvantages of Microservices Architecture appeared first on Cloud Academy.

AWS Security Blog

The AWS security blog is a great way to help keep you ahead of new challenges, changes and developments relating to all things related to AWS security. It is updated regularly with new posts, promoting news, best practices, service features and announcements, technical how-to’s, events and much more.  It provides a vast library of content that you can sift through to keep on top of your security needs. The posts allow you to comment should you have any questions or queries, in addition to sharing a link to the post using social media channels such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or email.

Some examples of the most recent posts include:

• AWS achieves its third ISMAP authorization in Japan
• Three ways to accelerate incident response in the cloud: insights from re:Inforce 2023
• Customer Compliance Guides now available on AWS Artifact

If you want to be notified every time a new security post has been published you can subscribe to the RSS feed using any feed reader. 

You can also check out the Cloud Academy Blog for the latest on recent AWS content updates, exam and certification updates and more. For more on how to stay in the know on all things AWS, read our latest post, Top 5 Ways to Get Certified on AWS Releases.

AWS Security Bulletins

AWS Security bulletins only focus on information that contains important information about security and privacy notifications, as a result there are far less bulletin posts compared to AWS Security blog posts. Any security bulletin posted should really be read and understood as it could have a significant impact on the security of your AWS environment.  You can filter the bulletins on the year it was published, in addition to if the content is listed as ‘important’ or ‘informational’.  

Some examples of the most recent bulletins include:

• Issue with AWS Directory Service EnableRoleAccess
  AWS-2023-003, 06/14/2023
• Reported GuardDuty Finding Issue
  AWS-2023-002, 05/18/2023
• Issue With IAM Supporting Multiple MFA Devices
  AWS-2023-001, 04/25/2023

As you can see, these bulletins focus more directly on security issues that could impact your environment.  

The Security Bulletin also has an RSS feed that you can follow to stay up to date.

As a tech leader, you know that security is one of the most significant issues holding back cloud adoption. Cloud Academy’s training library focuses deeply on IT Security, allowing your team to stay up to date on new security breaches and ways to resolve them.

To learn more about how we can help you to secure your cloud environment, or for help on choosing the right AWS security certifications for you and your team, contact us and request a free demo!

AWS Service Documentation

The rate of change to AWS services, features and toolsets can sometimes be difficult to stay on top of, last year alone there were over 2000 updates to their services.  If you subscribe to the AWS Security blog post, then you might want to dive deeper into an announcement that has been made regarding a new security service.  Looking at the Service Documentation will provide you a high-level overview of the service in question.  As expected there is a section for all AWS services, but the area that you’ll likely be interested in can be found under the heading of Security, Identity & Compliance which covers all security services offered by AWS.

Selecting one of these services will give you a single page high-level overview of the service selected, giving you enough information to understand what it does, the benefit it provides, and how it can fit into your architecture to enhance your security posture.

As an example of the kind of document you’ll see, the following extract has been taken from the AWS Key Management Service documentation.  

AWS re:Inforce

Every year AWS hosts a conference specifically aimed at all things security, AWS re:Inforce! This year (2023) it was held in Anaheim, California and was a 2 day event.  This is a fantastic opportunity to connect with industry leaders in this field and attend some great breakout sessions to enhance your knowledge in different areas, relevant for beginners and experts, you will find sessions for all.  By visiting the Expo you’ll be able to interact with AWS experts and receive demonstrations on the latest services and technology.  

It all starts with the Keynote session, which is highly recommended as you will normally be first to hear of new security services and technologies that AWS is launching and making generally available. To find out more about this year’s announcements that were made during the keynote, held by CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for AWS, read this post.

The great thing about these AWS conferences is that some of the sessions are recorded, which you can view at a later date via the AWS events YouTube Channel.  This playlist is specifically related to AWS re:Inforce 2023, so feel free to go and take a look!

Other Industry News

Now of course you shouldn’t just rely on AWS blogs and bulletins to enhance your knowledge within the world of security, there are also numerous industry news feeds which cover security as a whole, and these should also be regularly visited and reviewed.  A few of them include, and in no particular order:

• SecurityWeek
• The Hacker News
• The Register
• Wired
• Threat Post
• Information Security Magazine
• CVE

As these sites cover a wide scope of security news, you’ll uncover information on topics such as vulnerabilities, data breaches, cyber attacks, threats, risk management, CISO strategies, events and conferences, podcasts, and more! 

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures List

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures List was set up as a program to help everyone identify, define, and catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities.  When these vulnerabilities are first discovered by partnered organizations across the globe, they are given a unique CVE record and published.  This allows security professionals to use this extensive list as a source of information to help them mitigate and protect themselves against known threats, and the great thing is that it’s free to use and search!  

Social Media

Most people use one form or another of social media, and it’s a very easy way to keep in the loop on topics of interest. There are a lot of companies and individuals who are leaders in the field of AWS and security, here are just 10 Twitter accounts to get you started! Start following and connect with these people and organizations to ensure their posts appear directly into your daily feed.

Twitter Accounts

• @awscloud – The official account for Amazon Web Services
• @AWSSecurityInfo – The official Twitter profile for AWS Security. Infrastructure and services to elevate your security in the cloud
• @AWS_Security – This is the official twitter account for the AWS Security Team. If you have a pressing security issue, please contact us.
• @AWSIdentity – The AWS Cloud allows customers to scale & innovate, while securely managing identities, resources & permissions. Follow us for the latest about AWS Identity.
• @ISC2  – An international nonprofit membership association focused on inspiring a safe and secure cyber world.
• @CVEnew – Official account maintained by the CVE Program to notify the community of new CVE IDs. cve.org
• @Werner – CTO @ Amazon
• @jeffbarr – Chief Evangelist @Amazon Web Services: follow me for AWS updates & chatter
• @mosescj58 – AWS CISO
• @TeriRadichel – CEO @2ndSightLab | Cybersecurity Author Instructor Pentester l GSE 240 | IANS Faculty 

To learn more about Cloud Academy and how we can assist you on your journey to the cloud, contact us and request a free demo!

The post Staying on Top of AWS Security Recommendations appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Cloud computing has benefited many enterprises by reducing costs and enabling a focus on one’s core business competence, rather than IT and infrastructure issues. Despite the general hype on the subject across the IT world, there can be disadvantages of cloud computing, especially in smaller operations. Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing and show you how to understand and contextualize any existing disadvantages.

So – if you’re wondering what are the disadvantages of cloud computing  – you are in the right place. In this article, we’ll explore some of the key disadvantages of cloud computing and share tips and best practices that your teams can employ to address them.

You can streamline this process by using a thorough, process-built approach to understanding cloud security, such as Cloud Academy’s Security – Specialty Certification Preparation for AWS Learning Path.

To learn more about how to keep your cloud environment secure with Cloud Academy, contact us and request a free demo!

Disadvantages of cloud computing explained

1). Downtime

Downtime is often cited as one of the biggest cloud computing disadvantages. Since cloud computing systems are internet-based, service outages are always an unfortunate possibility and can occur for any reason.

The financial impact of service disruptions and outages is staggering. A recent survey conducted by Uptime Institute indicates that about 31% of businesses have experienced an IT service incident or outage that significantly impacted their operations within the past three years. On average, an outage and or slowdown can cost a business upwards of $100,000 an hour. Unfortunately, no organization is immune, especially when critical business processes cannot afford to be interrupted. In 2023 several companies and services were hit by outages, including IT Glue, Microsoft, Google Cloud and AWS (a major web services provider), Oracle, and Datadog.

Best practices for minimizing planned downtime in a cloud environment

• Design services with high availability and disaster recovery in mind. Leverage the multi-availability zones provided by cloud vendors in your infrastructure.
• If your services have a low tolerance for failure, consider multi-region deployments with automated failover to ensure the best business continuity possible.
• Define and implement a disaster recovery plan in line with your business objectives that provide the lowest possible recovery time (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
• Consider implementing dedicated connectivity such as AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, or Google Cloud’s Dedicated Interconnect or Partner Interconnect. These services provide a dedicated network connection between you and the cloud service point of presence. This can reduce exposure to the risk of business interruption from the public internet.
• Read the fine print on your Service Level Agreement (SLA). Are you guaranteed 99.9% uptime or even better? That 0.1% downtime equals about 45 minutes per month or around eight hours per year.

2). Security and privacy

Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, storing data and important files on external service providers always opens up risks. Any discussion involving data must address security and privacy, especially when it comes to managing sensitive data. We must not forget what happened at Code Space and the hacking of their AWS EC2 console, which led to data deletion and the eventual shutdown of the company. Their dependence on remote cloud-based infrastructure meant taking on the risks of outsourcing everything.

Of course, any cloud computing service provider is expected to manage and safeguard the underlying hardware infrastructure of a deployment. However, your responsibilities lie in the realm of user access management, and it’s up to you to carefully weigh all the risk scenarios.

Though recent breaches of credit card data and user login credentials are still fresh in the minds of the public, steps have been taken to ensure the safety of data. One such example is the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR), which was recently enacted in the European Union to provide users more control over their data. Nonetheless, you still need to be aware of your responsibilities and follow best practices.

Best practices for minimizing security and privacy risks

• This is important: Understand the shared responsibility model of your cloud provider. You will still be liable for what occurs within your network and in your product.
• Implement security at every level of your deployment.
• Know who is supposed to have access to each resource and service, and limit access to least privilege. If an employee goes rogue and gains access to your deployment, you would want their impact to be over the smallest area as possible.
• Make sure your team’s skills are up to the task. The Top 10 Things Cybersecurity Professionals Need to Know is a great article to understand how to mitigate security and privacy concerns in the cloud.
• Take a risk-based approach to securing assets used in the cloud and extend security to the devices.
• Implement multi-factor authentication for all accounts accessing sensitive data or systems.
• Encryption, encryption, encryption. Turn on encryption wherever you can — easy wins are on object storage such as Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage where customer data often resides. The simple act of turning on encryption on S3 could have prevented the Capital One data breach in July 2019 that exposed 100 million users’ information.

3). Vulnerability to attack

Going on with the drawbacks of cloud computing, another one concerns vulnerability: in cloud computing, every component is online, which exposes potential vulnerabilities. Even the best teams suffer severe attacks and security breaches from time to time. Since cloud computing is built as a public service, it’s easy to run before you learn to walk. After all, no one at a cloud vendor checks your administration skills before granting you an account: all it takes to get started is generally a valid credit card.

Best practices to help you reduce cloud attacks

• Make security a core aspect of all IT operations.
• Keep ALL your teams up-to-date with cloud security best practices.
• Ensure security policies and procedures are regularly checked and reviewed.
• Proactively classify information and apply access control.
• Use cloud services such as AWS Inspector, AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config to automate compliance controls.
• Prevent data exfiltration.
• Integrate prevention and response strategies into security operations.
• Discover rogue projects with audits.
• Remove password access from accounts that do not need to log in to services.
• Review and rotate access keys and credentials.
• Follow security blogs and announcements to be aware of known attacks.
• Apply security best practices for any open source software that you are using.
• Again, use encryption whenever and wherever possible. 

These practices will help your organization monitor for the exposure and movement of critical data, defend crucial systems from attack and compromise, and authenticate access to infrastructure and data to protect against further risks.

If you are a tech team leader looking to bring your team up to speed on AWS, but you don’t have the time, ask about our Cloud Certification Fast-track program. You crush your certification goals with direct support from our team of cloud experts. Custom training, visibility into progress, and end-to-end program management are just some of the features. Contact our team today and request a free demo to find out how the program works. Also read, The 12 AWS certifications: Choosing the right one for you and your team, for more on our AWS courses.

4). Limited control and flexibility

Since the cloud infrastructure is entirely owned, managed, and monitored by the cloud service provider, it transfers minimal control over to the customer.

To varying degrees (depending on the particular service), cloud users may find they have less control over the function and execution of services within a cloud-hosted infrastructure. A cloud provider’s end-user license agreement (EULA) and management policies might impose limits on what customers can do with their deployments. Customers retain control of their applications, data, and services, but may not have the same level of control over their backend infrastructure.

Best practices for maintaining control and flexibility

• Consider using a cloud service provider partner to help with implementing, running, and supporting cloud services.
• Understand your responsibilities and the responsibilities of the cloud vendor in the shared responsibility model to reduce the chance of omission or error.
• Make time to understand your cloud service provider’s basic level of support. Will this service level meet your support requirements? Most cloud service providers offer additional support tiers over and above the basic support for an additional cost.
• Make sure you understand the SLA concerning the infrastructure and services you’re going to use and how that will impact your agreements with your customers.

5). Vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in is another perceived disadvantage of cloud computing. Easy switching between cloud services is a service that hasn’t yet completely evolved, and organizations may find it difficult to migrate their services from one vendor to another. Differences between vendor platforms may create difficulties in migrating from one cloud platform to another, which could equate to additional costs and configuration complexities. Gaps or compromises made during migration could also expose your data to additional security and privacy vulnerabilities.

Best practices to decrease dependency

• Design with cloud architecture best practices in mind. All cloud computing services provide the opportunity to improve availability and performance, decouple layers, and reduce performance bottlenecks. If you have built your services using cloud architecture best practices, you are less likely to have issues porting from one cloud platform to another.
• Properly understand what your vendors are selling to help avoid lock-in challenges.
• Employ a multi-cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in. While this may add both development and operational complexity to your deployments, it doesn’t have to be a deal breaker. Training can help prepare teams to architect and select best-fit services and technologies.
• Build in flexibility as a matter of strategy when designing applications to ensure portability now and in the future.
• Build your applications with services that offer cloud-first advantages, such as modularity and portability of microservices and code. Think containers and Kubernetes.

6). Cost concerns

The last one of the disadvantages of cloud computing concerns cost. Adopting cloud solutions on a small scale and for short-term projects can be perceived as being expensive. However, the most significant cloud computing benefit is in terms of IT cost savings. Pay-as-you-go cloud services can provide more flexibility and lower hardware costs, but the overall price tag could end up being higher than you expected. Until you are sure of what will work best for you, it’s a good idea to experiment with a variety of offerings. You might also make use of the cost calculators made available by providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

Best practices to reduce costs

• Try not to over provision your services, but rather look into using auto-scaling services.
• Ensure you have the option to scale DOWN as well as UP.
• Pre-pay and take advantage of reserved instances if you have a known minimum usage.
• Automate the process to start/stop your instances to save money when they are not being used.
• Create alerts to track cloud spending.

Disadvantages of cloud computing: Closing thoughts

Many organizations benefit from the agility, scale, and pay-per-use billing that cloud services offer. However, as with any infrastructure service, the suitability of cloud computing for your specific use case should be assessed in a risk-based evaluation. Build in time for research and planning to understand how the cloud will affect your business.

Let Cloud Academy help you along your journey to the cloud. Contact us today for a free demo.

The post Disadvantages of Cloud Computing appeared first on Cloud Academy.

This rapid growth has led to a dramatic increase in the number of jobs requiring Azure skills. One of the best ways to prove that you have those skills is by obtaining certifications.

But as a tech leader, how do you know which certifications to guide your team towards, and how do you assess their skill level/efficiency?

In this article, we’ll cover the most popular Microsoft Azure certification exams and help you get started with choosing a learning path that best meets your cloud computing goals.

Whether you are looking for study materials for an Azure certification or simply want to find out more about what Azure can offer your enterprise, Cloud Academy’s Microsoft Azure Training Library is loaded with learning paths, courses, practice certification exams, hands-on labs, lab challenges, and lab playgrounds. Our learning paths are guided learning experiences that provide step-by-step training to build your technical knowledge and hands-on skills using actual Azure accounts in live environments.

Fill out the form to learn more about how our tech skills assessments can help you save time by identifying the exact skills your team needs.

Fill out the form below and get a free demo!

Choosing the right Azure certification: What’s the value?

Azure certifications stand out for their intense evaluation of a candidate’s expertise, focusing on practical experience and proven techniques. 

Executives in charge of an IT team will find that obtaining Azure certification can be an excellent way to not only build foundational knowledge of Azure services and solutions, but also assess the capabilities of more seasoned team members.

Are Azure certifications worth it?

Any certification that demonstrates your knowledge and expertise within the IT industry is certainly worth obtaining. In a market that is full of competition, being able to stand out above a crowd can help you get noticed and put you on your journey to achieve your professional goals.

If there are a number of candidates applying for a position, and all have the same credentials and experience, but one of them has a number of recognized Azure credentials to reinforce their knowledge, then this goes a long way in making you the chosen candidate.

It is not just about validating your knowledge however, it says a lot about you as a person. It shows commitment, dedication, the willingness to learn, the drive to stay at the forefront of innovation, and sometimes this demonstrates more to people than what the actual certification stands for.

How do I become Azure certified?

While no particular approach is necessary when it comes to studying for the Azure certification,  the following steps are a great starting point: 

• Enroll in an Azure training class, such as any of the ones mentioned in this article. They will certainly increase your knowledge of cloud computing and Azure.
• Review any study or exam guides available.
• Read multiple Azure whitepapers. These hold some invaluable information, which may answer many of your questions.
• Practice, practice, practice. Practice exams will help ease any worries or stress you may be having about the certification exam.
• Schedule the exam once you are ready. It typically takes anywhere from 80-120 hours of practice/studying to be prepared for the exam based on experience and the certification you are pursuing.

Azure certifications: Which is best?

All Azure certifications are important and are a great asset to have from a professional standpoint. Deciding which one to take, or which one is ‘best’ largely depends on your interests, your role, and where you would like to take your career.

For example, If you are looking to move into application development, then the following route would be a great fit: 

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals  
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert

So it really depends on what you are trying to achieve as an individual, and where you want to take your career.

Microsoft Azure currently offers 19 certifications. All certifications are role-based, with titles such as Azure Administrator, Azure Solution Architect, Azure Developer, and Azure AI Engineer. They’re organized into 4 levels: Fundamentals, Associate, Expert, and Specialty. These certifications focus on building knowledge and skills related to job roles. They were designed with the engagement of the community in identifying the requirements for each role. You can find a complete overview on Cloud Academy’s Azure certifications page.

Here are all the Azure certifications we’ll cover in this post:

• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals-Level certifications:
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals – Exam AZ-900
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals – Exam AI-900
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals – Exam DP-900
  • Microsoft Certified: Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals – Exam SC-900
    
• Microsoft Azure Associate-Level certifications:
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate – Exam AZ-104
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate – Exam AZ-204
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate – Exam AZ-500
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Network Engineer Associate – Exam AZ-700
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate – Exam AI-102
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Scientist Associate – Exam DP-100
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate – Exam DP-203
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate – Exam DP-300
  • Microsoft Certified: Security Operations Analyst Associate – Exam SC-200
  • Microsoft Certified: Identity and Access Administrator Associate – Exam SC-300
    
• Microsoft Azure Expert-Level certifications:
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert – Exam AZ-305
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert – Exam AZ-400
    
• Microsoft Azure Specialty certifications:
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure for SAP Workloads Specialty – Exam AZ-120
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty – Exam AZ-140
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure IoT Developer Specialty – Exam AZ-220

Bringing your team up to speed on Azure can take time you may not have. But with our Cloud Certification Fast-track program, you can crush your certification goals with direct support from our team of cloud experts. 

Custom training, visibility into progress, and end-to-end program management are just some of the features. Contact our team today to find out how the program works.

Now, let’s take a closer look at each exam.

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals-Level certifications

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. The Azure fundamentals certification is designed to validate a foundational knowledge level of Azure cloud services. It is intended for both technical and non-technical candidates.  

Areas Covered

• Understand foundational cloud concepts such as high availability, scalability, reliability, cloud models, and cloud service types
• Describe compute, networking, storage, and core architectural components of Azure
• Describe identity, access, and security
• Describe Azure management, governance, compliance, and monitoring tools

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 50
• Duration: 60 Minutes
• Passing Score Required: 700
• Cost: $99

To prepare for this exam, check out the AZ-900 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AI-900 Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals exam. Candidates who are interested in earning this fundamental level certification must have a basic knowledge of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions on Microsoft Azure.

Areas Covered

• Describe AI workloads and considerations, including features of common AI workloads and guiding principles for responsible AI
• Describe fundamental principles of machine learning on Azure, such as common machine learning types and scenarios
• Describe features of computer vision workloads on Azure
• Describe features of natural language processing (NLP) workloads on Azure, such as conversational AI

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 50 – 60
• Duration: 60 Minutes
• Cost: $99

To get ready for this exam, check out the AI-900 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the DP-900 Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals exam. Candidates who want to earn this certification should understand core data concepts, relational and non-relational data, and analytics workloads on Azure.

Areas Covered

• Describe core data concepts, such as common data workloads and ways to represent data
• Identify considerations for relational data on Azure, including relational concepts and relational Azure data services
• Describe considerations for working with non-relational data on Azure, including capabilities of Azure Storage and Azure Cosmos DB
• Describe analytics workloads on Azure, including large-scale analytics, real-time data analytics, data visualization in Microsoft Power BI

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 50
• Duration: 60 Minutes
• Cost: $99

If you want to get ready for this exam, go through the DP-900 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the SC-900 Microsoft Azure Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals exam. Candidates who want to earn this certification should have a general knowledge of the security, compliance, and identity capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure.

Areas Covered

• Describe the concepts of security, compliance, and identity
• Describe the capabilities of Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), part of Microsoft Entra
• Describe the capabilities of Microsoft security solutions
• Describe the capabilities of Microsoft compliance solutions

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 60 Minutes
• Cost: $99

To get ready for this exam, check out the SC-900 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Associate-Level certifications

Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate exam. The AZ-104 exam is the replacement for the AZ-103 exam.

This exam will test the knowledge and capabilities of candidates in the configuration and management of compute, storage, virtual networking, and monitoring in an Azure environment.

An Azure Administrator is a subject matter expert (SME) who is responsible for implementing the Azure-based cloud infrastructure of an organization.

Areas Covered

• Manage Azure identities and governance, including Azure AD objects, role-based access control (RBAC), and subscriptions and governance
• Implement and manage storage, including Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage
• Deploy and manage Azure compute resources, including virtual machines, containers, and Azure App Service
• Configure and manage virtual networking, including virtual networks and load balancers
• Monitor and maintain Azure resources

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

If you want to get ready for this exam, try the AZ-104 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Developer Associate Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-204 Microsoft Azure Developer Associate exam. The AZ-204 exam is the replacement for the AZ-203 exam.

Candidates for this certification should be familiar with designing, building, and testing Azure-based apps and services. Candidates should also have 1-2 years of development experience with proficiency in data storage and connections, Azure SDKs, debugging, monitoring, performance tuning, etc.

Areas Covered

• Develop Azure compute solutions, including IaaS solutions, web apps, and Azure Functions
• Develop for Azure storage, including Cosmos DB storage and blob storage
• Implement Azure security, including authentication and authorization
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize Azure solutions
• Connect to and consume Azure services and third-party services using API Management, event-based solutions, and message-based solutions

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To prepare for this exam, you should take the AZ-204 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Security Engineer Associate Certification

As a team leader, you are fully aware that the security concerns associated with cloud computing are one of the biggest impediments to its wide-spread adoption.
If you’re interested in understanding how to keep your cloud environment secure with Cloud Academy, contact us and request a free demo!

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Engineer Associate exam. This certification is designed for candidates who implement and manage security controls, identity, and access management and are responsible for securing cloud data, apps, and networks. As a Microsoft Azure security engineer, candidates are responsible for managing and securing cloud-based solutions and may also secure hybrid cloud solutions as part of an end-to-end infrastructure.

This exam requires strong skills in automation and scripting, a deep understanding of virtualization technology and virtual networking, and a strong familiarity with Microsoft cloud services and products.

Areas Covered

• Manage identity and access using Azure Active Directory and role-based access control (RBAC)
• Implement platform protection, including advanced security for compute and networks
• Manage security operations, including policy management, threat protection, and security monitoring solutions
• Secure data and applications

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To get ready for this exam, check out the AZ-500 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Network Engineer Associate Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-700 Microsoft Azure Network Engineer Associate exam. This certification is designed for people who already have experience with Microsoft Azure networking.

Areas Covered

• Design, implement, and manage hybrid networking
• Design and implement core networking infrastructure
• Design and implement routing
• Secure and monitor networks
• Design and implement private access to Azure services

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To prepare for this exam, you should take the AZ-700 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure AI Engineer Associate Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AI-102 Microsoft Azure AI Engineer Associate exam. This associate-level certification is designed for candidates who implement Microsoft AI solutions like natural language processing, knowledge mining, speech, computer vision, bots, and agents using Cognitive Services, Cognitive Search, and the Bot Framework.

Candidates for this exam should have at least a general knowledge of IT architecture and software development experience, especially using REST APIs.

Areas Covered

• Plan and manage an Azure Cognitive Services solution
• Implement Computer Vision solutions
• Implement natural language processing solutions
• Implement knowledge-mining solutions
• Implement conversational AI solutions

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

If you want to get ready for this exam, you should check the AZ-102 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Data Scientist Associate Certification

The demand for this certification has increased significantly. As data sets grow, companies are looking to data scientists to uncover hidden trends and extract value from complex sets of data that will help inform business decisions.

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the DP-100 Microsoft Azure Data Scientist Associate exam. This certification is focused on designing and implementing a data science solution on Azure. You will learn how to apply Azure machine learning approaches in training, evaluation, and deployment of models that are used to solve business problems.

Areas Covered

• Design and prepare a machine learning solution
• Explore data and train models
• Prepare a model for deployment
• Deploy and retrain a model

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 180 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To get ready for this exam, check out the DP-100 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Data Engineer Associate Certification

To get this certification and become an Azure Data Engineer, you need to pass the DP-203 Microsoft Azure Data Engineer Associate exam. This certification is designed for people who know how to implement systems for exploring, processing, and analyzing data on Azure.

Areas Covered

• Design and implement data storage on Azure
• Design and develop data processing on Azure
• Design and implement data security on Azure
• Monitor and optimize data storage and data processing on Azure

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

If you want to get ready for this exam, take the DP-203 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Database Administrator Associate Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the DP-300 Microsoft Azure Database Administrator Associate exam. This is a role-based Azure certification exam that would be ideal for candidates who are interested in administering cloud-based database systems. By achieving this certification, candidates prove they can manage Azure SQL Database and Microsoft SQL Server.

Areas Covered

• Plan and implement data platform resources
• Implement a secure environment
• Monitor, configure, and optimize database resources
• Configure and manage automation of tasks
• Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) environment

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To get ready for this exam, you should check out the DP-300 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Security Operations Analyst Associate Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the SC-200 Microsoft Azure Security Operations Analyst Associate exam. This certification is designed for IT professionals who are familiar with threat mitigation using Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Sentinel.

Areas Covered

• Mitigate threats using Microsoft 365 Defender
• Mitigate threats using Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Mitigate threats using Microsoft Sentinel

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

If you want to get ready for this exam, you should take the SC-200 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Identity and Access Administrator Associate Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the SC-300 Microsoft Azure Identity and Access Administrator Associate exam. This certification is designed for IT professionals who know how to manage identity and access on Microsoft 365 and Azure.

Areas Covered

• Implement identities in Azure AD
• Implement authentication and access management
• Implement access management for applications
• Plan and implement identity governance in Azure AD

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To get ready for this exam, take the SC-300 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Expert-Level certifications

Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass both the AZ-305 Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert exam and the AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate exam.

This certification is designed for candidates who have advanced knowledge of Azure architecture. You don’t have to take the AZ-104 exam before taking AZ-305, but you have to pass both of them to get the certification.

Areas Covered

• Design identity, governance, and monitoring solutions
• Design data storage solutions
• Design business continuity solutions
• Design infrastructure solutions

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: AZ-104 exam (or you can take the AZ-104 exam after AZ-305)
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To prepare for this exam, take the AZ-305 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer Expert Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-400 Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer Expert exam as well as either the AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate exam or the AZ-204 Azure Developer Associate exam. This certification is designed for DevOps professionals who bring people, processes, and technologies closer to deliver valuable services and products that meet business requirements and objectives. DevOps engineers are responsible for delivering cloud services by improving collaboration and communications, designing, and implementing strategies for app coding, and creating automation, continuous delivery, monitoring, and feedback. For this job role, candidates should be proficient with Agile practices and familiar with both Azure development and operations processes.

Areas Covered

• Configure processes and communications
• Design and implement source control
• Design and implement build and release pipelines
• Develop a security and compliance plan
• Implement an instrumentation strategy

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: Azure Administrator Associate or Azure Developer Associate certification
• Number of Questions: 50 – 70
• Duration: 180 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To get ready for this exam, take the AZ-400 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Specialty certifications

Microsoft Azure for SAP Workloads Specialty Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-120 Microsoft Azure for SAP Workloads Specialty exam. This certification is designed for people who have familiarity with SAP components and a general understanding of computing architecture such as networking, databases, and computer hardware.

Areas Covered

• Migrate SAP Workloads to Azure
• Design and implement an infrastructure to support SAP workloads on Azure
• Design and implement high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR)
• Maintain SAP Workloads on Azure

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To get ready for this exam, take the AZ-120 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-140 Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty exam. This certification is designed for people who have experience administering Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop.

Areas Covered

• Plan and implement an Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure
• Plan and implement identity and security
• Plan and implement user environments and apps
• Monitor and maintain an Azure Virtual Desktop infrastructure

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To get ready for this exam, take the AZ-140 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Specialty Certification

To get this Azure certification, you need to pass the AZ-220 Microsoft Azure IoT Developer Specialty exam. This certification is designed for people who want to become Azure IoT developers and already have experience with software development and Microsoft Azure.

Areas Covered

• Set up the Azure IoT Hub solution infrastructure
• Provision and manage devices
• Implement IoT Edge
• Implement business integration
• Process and manage data
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize IoT solutions
• Implement security

Exam Information

• Prerequisites: None
• Number of Questions: 40 – 60
• Duration: 120 Minutes
• Cost: $165

To get ready for this exam, take the AZ-220 Exam Preparation Learning Path on Cloud Academy.

How to renew Azure certification and stay up to date

Microsoft role-based (associate and expert) and specialty certifications are valid for one (1) year from the date that you complete all requirements to earn that certification.

To prevent your certification from expiring you must renew the certification before the expiration date. 

Renewals are free 

There’s no cost to renew your certification, just make sure you pass the online assessment before your certification expires. Fundamentals certifications do not expire.

Six-month renewal window

You can take the renewal assessment any time during your six-month eligibility window, via Microsoft Learn. Once you pass, your certification will be extended one year from the expiration date.

Assessments are short and unproctored

Assessments focus on recent technological and industry updates, so they’re shorter than the original exam(s) and are open-book. You can take the assessment as many times as you need as long as you pass before your certification expires.

If you are a tech team leader, you want to make sure your tech talents stay up to date with the latest releases and certifications. But bringing your team up to speed on AWS can take time you may not have. With our Cloud Certification Fast-track program, you can crush your certification goals with direct support from our team of cloud experts. Custom training, visibility into progress, and end-to-end program management are just some of the features. Contact our team today and request a free demo to find out how the program works.

Conclusion

Microsoft is one of the largest and fastest-growing players in the public cloud market. If you are interested in making a career using Microsoft Azure technologies, I highly recommend choosing one or more of the above-mentioned certifications.

These role-based certifications include configuration and management of compute, storage, networking, security, reliability, integration, development, and operations capabilities. Organizations are rapidly adopting Microsoft Azure cloud services, and the demand is growing for certified Azure administrators, solution architects, developers, and security engineers. To become certified and successfully land a job, you’ll not only need to learn how to configure, manage, and secure Azure cloud environments, but you’ll also need practical, hands-on experience. Cloud Academy offers Microsoft Azure Certifications Learning Paths that not only help you pass the Azure certification exams but also allow you to test your skills in real-world environments with hands-on labs, lab challenges, and lab playgrounds. From configuring Azure infrastructure for cloud administrators to integrating Azure services for cloud architects, these learning paths fully prepare you with the knowledge and experience you need to start or advance your Azure career.

To learn more about how we help companies go beyond training to upskill, reskill, and retain proven tech talent through our platform, contact us.

Good luck and Happy learning!

Frequently Asked Question (FAQ)

What are the top 3 certifications in Azure?

Some of the top Azure certifications include: 

• Azure Fundamentals
• Azure Administrator Associate
• Azure Developer Associate

What are the different levels of Azure certification?

Azure certifications are organized into 4 levels: Fundamentals, Associate, Expert, and Specialty. These certifications focus on building knowledge and skills related to specific job roles. 

How much does Azure certification cost?

The prices of the exams are different based on the level of the certification:

• Fundamentals = $99
• Associate = $165
• Expert = $165
• Specialty = $165

Can I get Azure certification online?

Yes! You can find Azure courses and training online from a variety of providers. Cloud Academy’s Microsoft Azure Training Library allows teams to access vital resources and education from anywhere.

How long does Azure certification last?

Microsoft role-based (associate and expert) and specialty certifications are valid for one (1) year from the date of completion.

Want to understand how Cloud Academy can help your team get Azure certified and always stay up to date?

With our Cloud Certification Fast-track program, you can crush your certification goals with direct support from our team of cloud experts. Custom training, visibility into progress, and end-to-end program management are just some of the features. Fill out the form to get a free demo and find out how the program works.

Fill out the form below and get a free demo!

The post Azure Certifications: Which is Right for You and Your Team? appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Having success when guiding your organization through a technological shift is a big challenge, though. At Cloud Academy, we’re here to help spell out exactly how you can navigate a cloud transformation successfully.

There are going to be tech challenges. There’s gonna be financial blockers. There’s gonna be issues with buy-in. 

What follows is a clear list of three main factors to consider if you want to have a successful cloud transformation. With this info, you can clearly understand the challenges ahead of you and plan to overcome them.

So let’s go!

Challenge #1: The People Factor

Change is a threat

Cloud transformation requires a change in behavior, which can be a challenge for many people in your org. But it’s not enough to just say that, because the question is, “Why?” It’s often just basic psychology: people don’t like change and see the change as a threat – to their status, to their job, or just to their routine.

To tackle this challenge, it’s essential to provide personal motivation to individuals for why they should make the effort to do things differently. One way to do this is by highlighting the benefits of cloud transformation for their role, such as increased efficiency or improved collaboration.

Another helpful strategy is to provide training and resources to help employees learn new skills and adapt to new processes. It’s important to create a supportive culture that encourages employees to take risks and learn from their mistakes. This can be achieved by recognizing and rewarding individuals who are willing to try new things and embracing a culture of continuous learning.

Challenge #2: The Process Factor

Finance, operations, and other business units will need to work differently

Using cloud services often requires a different way of working, which can create friction points within existing processes. To ensure cloud transformation is successful, it’s crucial to identify and remove these friction points before they occur. This can be done by involving all relevant teams in the planning process, including finance, IT, and business stakeholders.

It’s also important to establish clear guidelines and procedures for working with cloud services. This can include developing a cloud governance framework that outlines roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes. This framework can help ensure that everyone is aligned on the goals and objectives of cloud transformation and is working together to achieve them.

Challenge #3: The Resource Factor

Moving toward Cloud Readiness

Cloud transformation requires significant time and effort, which can be a drain on resources. To avoid resource constraints, it’s important to develop a clear plan for how resources will be allocated throughout the transformation process. This plan should include identifying the necessary skill sets and expertise required for each phase of the transformation and allocating resources accordingly.

To ensure success, it’s also important to secure executive buy-in and support for the transformation. This can be done by clearly communicating the business benefits of cloud transformation and providing regular updates on progress and outcomes. By keeping stakeholders informed and engaged, you can build momentum and ensure the necessary resources are in place to achieve your cloud transformation goals.

Conclusion

We’re laying out the process simply here, and we’re going to give you help in spreading your message to your organization. Stay tuned for more resources to help guide you in your cloud transformation, plus deeper breakdowns with actionable insights.

The post Cloud Challenges Nobody Tells Execs appeared first on Cloud Academy.

In the next two posts, we’ll cover all cloud computing services and their most common use cases, as well as the disadvantages of cloud computing you should know.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing adoption is a key strategy for many organizations. The significant business and technical advantages offered by the cloud are changing the landscape of how many companies and corporations operate on a huge scale.

Put simply, cloud computing is a remote virtual pool of on-demand shared resources offering compute, storage, and network services that can be rapidly deployed at scale. Cloud computing technology is based on virtualization. Virtualization allows the possibility of having multiple virtual machines, each essentially running a separate operating system and applications installed on one physical server. These VMs all run at the same time without being aware of each other’s existence, while sharing the underlying hardware resources of the server.

There are obvious benefits of virtualization, including reduced capital expenditure. Because you can have multiple VMs installed on one physical host, you don’t need to purchase as much physical hardware. Less hardware means a smaller footprint for your data center or server farm, and lower costs for power and cooling. In a cloud environment, the optimization of resourcing and equipment means that everyone who uses the infrastructure—both vendors and consumers—can benefit from this approach.
Now, just a quick note before we leave the topic of virtualization. A VM within the public cloud is sometimes referred to as an instance. This term is very vendor specific, but it refers to the same object as a virtual machine.

History of cloud computing

The early history of cloud computing begins back in the 1950s and 1960s when mainframe computers were used by large companies. These mainframes were expensive, so naturally it was a challenge for every company to purchase them.

Instead, a process called time sharing was developed which allowed users to access more than one instance simultaneously, which was a brilliant way to get the most amount of processing power available. In essence, this was the first example of cloud computing because it involved shared computer resources at scale.

In 1969, computer scientists worked on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, an early precursor to the modern internet. The goal of this network was to allow people to use programs and info from any location on earth.

The next series of progressions included virtual machines (VMs), allowing more than one computing system in a single physical unit, along with increased server hosting. As the 1980s and 1980s and 1990s progressed, more companies advanced the usage of remote (cloud) networked computing to include more advanced server hosting and products delivered from a website, such as Salesforce. 

Amazon launched AWS in 2006 which began with storage and compute services. Soon after, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and others followed and have accelerated the pace of cloud evolution.

Cloud Computing resources

When discussing cloud computing resources, it won’t be long before you come across the following terms: compute, storage, and network resources. A clear understanding of all cloud resources is essential for identifying what services you want to move to a cloud, should you decide to do so.

Compute

Compute objects provide the brains to process your workload, including what is required to process and run requests from your applications and services. In the cloud, compute resources compare to the hardware devices with CPUs and RAM, typically your servers, and how they work in a classic, on-the-ground environment.

Storage

Storage resources simply allow you to save your data across a shared environment. Any object that allows you to save your data in the cloud is a storage resource. In a typical environment, these would be seen as server hard discs, network attached storage (NAS) used for file-level shared storage access over the network, and the high-speed storage area network (SAM), which is block-level shared storage accessed over a high-speed network.

Network Resources

These provide the connectivity that allows all of the other resources to communicate with each other. In a typical environment, this would be accomplished through hardware such as routers (to route traffic between your networks), switches (which provide the background of network connectivity that allows other hosts to talk to one another), and firewalls (to allow or deny traffic into the environment).

If we go back to our original definition of what is cloud computing, we can say that it is a remote virtual pool of on-demand shared resources offering compute, storage, and network services that can be rapidly deployed at scale.

How does cloud computing work?

Cloud management platforms provide an interface for users and organizations to manage their cloud resources. These platforms allow users to create and manage resources, including compute instances, storage, networking, and other services. Cloud management platforms also provide a way to manage and deploy applications and workloads on the cloud.

Cloud management platforms can be used to manage public and private clouds. They can also be used to manage multiple cloud providers, allowing users to switch between providers without having to recreate their resources.

Cloud management platforms are often used by organizations to standardize their cloud deployments. They can also be used to automate tasks, such as creating and managing resources, or deploying applications and workloads.

Types of cloud computing

There are three typical types of cloud computing (also named models) categorized by different levels of management and security: public, private, and hybrid.

Public cloud computing type

A public cloud computing model is where a vendor makes available the use of a shared infrastructure, including compute storage and network resources that can be provisioned on demand and typically accessed over the internet for public usage. Thanks to this type of cloud computing, the consumer will never see the hardware used, nor know the exact location of their data, but they will be able to specify the geographical region to aid with the speed of performance, depending on where users are located.

From a design perspective, it makes sense to host your infrastructure as close as possible to your users’ geographic region to reduce latency. All back end maintenance for physical location services such as power, cooling, etc., along with the physical maintenance of host and hardware failures will be maintained by the vendor and invisible to the end user. As a general rule, you can access your services on the public cloud from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.

Private cloud computing type

With a private cloud computing model, the infrastructure is privately hosted, managed, and owned by the individual company using it, giving it greater and more direct control of its data. As a result, the hardware is usually held on premises. This differs from a typical on-premise server file approach in that the same cloud principles are applied to the design, such as the use of virtualization. This creates a pool of shared compute, storage, and network resources.

With this type of cloud computing, greater capital expenditure is required to acquire the host and the data center where they physically reside. Additional resources will be needed for the day-to-day operations and maintenance of this equipment. As a result, your daily operational costs will also increase compared to that of a public cloud model.

Hybrid cloud computing type

The hybrid cloud computing model makes use of both public and private clouds. This model may be used for seasonal burst traffic or disaster recovery.

This type of cloud computing is established when a network link is configured between the private cloud to the services within the public cloud, essentially extending the logical internal network. This takes the benefits given from both the public and private models and allows you to architect your services in the most appropriate model. Hybrid clouds are normally short-term configurations, perhaps for test and def purposes, and can often be a transitional state for enterprises before moving their service to the public cloud entirely.

Benefits of cloud computing

There are a number of important characteristics that allows cloud computing to be such a powerful service.

On-demand resourcing

When you want to provision a source within the cloud, it’s almost immediately available to you. You can allocate it when and where you need it, so there’s no more waiting around for hardware to be ordered and stored, cabled and configured before using it.

Scalable

Cloud computing allows you to rapidly scale your environment’s resources up and down, and in and out, depending on the requirements and demands of your applications and services. When scaling up and down, you’re altering the power of an instance, perhaps using one with a greater CPU power. When scaling in and out, you’re simply adding or removing the number of instances you’re using. This offers a significant advantage compared to on-premise solutions from a cost perspective alone.
Because public cloud resources are optimized and shared between different organizations, the end user can benefit from exceptionally low compute storage and network costs compared to traditional hosting.

Flexibility and elasticity

Cloud computing offers huge flexibility and elasticity to your design approach. You can choose to have as many or as few resources as you require. You decide how much and how long you want them for, and at what scale. There are no retention contracts to adhere to for services.

Growth

Cloud computing offers your organization the ability to grow using a wide range of resources and services. Couple this with the on-demand element that we’ve already mentioned and your growth constraints are significantly reduced compared to a classic environment.

Utility-based metering

With many cloud services, you “pay as you go” which means you only pay for what you use. If you only have one server, or instance, running for two hours, and then shut it down, you only pay for two hours of compute resources. That’s it. You only pay for resources when you use them.

Shared infrastructure

Hosts within the cloud are virtualized. As a result, multiple tenants can be running instances on the same piece of hardware. This significantly reduces the amount of physical hardware required, which in turn reduces the amount of power, cording, and space required in the data center. In turn, this results in lower costs for you.

Highly available

By design, many of the core services with the public cloud and its underlying infrastructure are replicated across different geographic zones. Having data covered in multiple different places automatically helps you ensure the durability and availability of your data and services without even having to configure an architect for this resilience. It’s all provided by the vendor as a part of their service.

Security

This is one of the most discussed topics within cloud computing. Public cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are considered to be more secure than your own data center. This is achieved by adhering to a shared responsibility model between the vendor and yourself. The vendor will operate at an exceptionally high standard of security for the underlying infrastructure of the cloud, and it’s down to you, the end user, to then architect security in the cloud using the tools, services, and applications available.

These are the key characteristics and benefits of cloud computing. You can see how different it is from the classic on-premise data center deployment that you may be used to.

Next: cloud computing services, use cases, and more

Stay tuned for our next posts. Just to remind you, we’ll talk about:

• Turnkey solutions in the cloud space – the big cloud service models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• The main cloud computing use cases
• The disadvantages of cloud computing you should know

In the meantime, If you’re interested to learn more about the basic concepts of cloud computing and the different deployment models, I recommend the Cloud Academy’s What is Cloud Computing? course.

Watch this short video for an overview of the course.

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The results of G2’s Fall 2021 awards rank our tech learning platform among leaders and high performers across four categories and over 35 reports.

G2 leads the pack in the tech marketplace and independent review vertical, providing insight into SaaS and professional services providers. Their quarterly reports are based on input from real customer reviews, categorized by industry, and organized to give better insights to future buyers and their enterprises.

With that in mind, we’d like to thank you — our customers and users — for your thoughtful and positive feedback. Our goal is to continually improve our content and platform for you, no matter the size of your organization or the stage of your career.

New Learning Management System awards for Fall 2021

For both the Implementation Index and Usability Index, Cloud Academy was recognized for Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Not only are we excited to be in this new category, but this illustrates just how our training plans, job roles, and enterprise platform as a whole are quick and powerful tools for Learning and Development Teams to quickly stand up an upskilling solution.

Get insights on Cloud Academy from users like you

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Of course, you’ll need your entire team on board, and that can be one of the trickiest parts of the journey to navigate. It’s simply not enough to adopt tools and tell your teams to start using them. However, fostering these four cloud competencies will help your team recognize new product opportunities and develop innovative solutions—increasing your ROI.

In this post, we’ll introduce the four essential cloud competencies, examine why they’re important, and share insights to help you develop them in your teams.

1. Awareness of Cloud Tools and Services

As with any journey, you can’t get anywhere until you know where you’re going. You may assume that everyone is aware of what cloud tools and services are available in their fields of expertise. While that may well be true for technical groups, like IT and development, it’s probably less so in areas that are less tied to technology, such as finance and HR.

In any case, not knowing about cloud tools and services and how they can help optimize processes may hold team members back from performing their tasks efficiently and effectively. And, of course, you need to bring leadership up to speed, too.

For example, analytics and AI are a big growth area right now, with a range of tools on offer to aid processes in almost every field. Being aware of which cloud tools are relevant to your goals will ensure that your entire organization benefits from the cloud transformation.

2. Cloud Proficiency

There are a number of reasons organizations transition to the cloud, but all of them hinge on ROI, a performance measure that evaluates how efficiently your organization is working in order to serve customers or attain other business goals, such as cutting costs. Yet you’ll only realize ROI in these areas if your team knows how to access and use cloud services properly.

It’s also important to consider that not using these services properly can result in massive security risks, such as leaving unencrypted confidential data—or even passwords and encryption keys themselves—inadvertently exposed in public repositories. 

Clearly, you’ll start seeing actual business benefits when your teams are proficient in using cloud tools and services securely, effectively, and economically. That’s why it’s essential to bring your teams up to speed as quickly as possible.

3. Ability to Leverage Cloud Tools and Services

As mentioned above, you’ll only start seeing ROI once your teams begin developing fluency in cloud tools. However, fluency merely allows team members to continue doing their jobs. With a higher cloud competency level, they’ll be able to solve business problems by applying cloud tools in creative and constructive ways.

For example, your team can leverage cloud tools to provide better customer service, thanks to flexible resource allocation, zero-downtime SLAs, faster access to the information they need, and more including reaping advantages of cloud storage.

But remember: These benefits don’t just happen automatically. Your team members need to acquire the first two competencies—awareness and proficiency—before they can start applying their knowledge creatively to improve your business.

4. Skill in Cloud Collaboration

Too often, different teams end up working in parallel—duplicating each others’ efforts; wasting time, money, and energy; and potentially introducing errors. The problem isn’t the cloud tools or services themselves; it’s a lack of collaboration. 

Collaboration brings together multiple aspects of your organization, such as IT, HR, development, operations, manufacturing, and fulfillment—the sky’s the limit. Rather than focusing on individual goals, these teams can work toward shared strategic goals, such as industry-leading innovation or superior user experience. (Don’t worry; individual departments benefit from collaboration, too!). 

With this competency, your teams will be able to identify areas of overlap so they can start introducing efficiencies. This is sometimes described as “breaking down silos,” but can be more constructively viewed as harnessing the best practices of all groups or departments.

The ability to build collaborative skills depends on organizational culture—groups or departments should never feel as though they are competing for limited resources. Instead, they should understand that they are collaborating to create a better organization and provide better service all around. This is a message which must come from above in order to help bring all teams on board.

All In It Together

Obviously, not every employee needs to be brought up to speed with every competency. Managers and technical teams, for example, will need to be more proficient in more tools and services than other employees who are simply using them. But of course, regardless of level and responsibility, every employee needs to master the tools and skills relevant to their job. And ideally, they’ll be able to work better following true cloud transformation.

Employees at all levels need to understand how cloud security concerns impact their work. And understanding how cloud tools will make their work easier, safer, and more efficient will increase buy-in. Yet, too often, getting buy-in from team members is difficult due to the massive changes that come with cloud transformation. 

To make sure nothing falls through the cracks, Cloud Academy has created a complete guide to help you plan for success at every stage of your journey to the cloud. It will show you how the four competencies we discussed in this article come together in real life by walking you step-by-step through the cloud transformation of a 10,000-person financial services company.

You’ll also explore:

• The five stages of the cloud journey
• Common pitfalls of cloud migration
• Essential metrics to define and measure success
• And much more

Cloud Academy can help you bring your employees up to speed on the competencies they need to succeed in the cloud. Download the guide to find out how. 

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