10 Cloud Computing Problems (With Solutions)

I feel your pain, Cloud Professional.

Every day, you’re dealing with escalating pressures and demands from all sides, against a landscape of risk and technology that never stops shifting.

Cloud technology is powerful — but, as our latest white paper illustrates, it’s no panacea. It’s elastic… but it’s easy to lose sight of where your resources are. It’s infinitely scalable… but also infinitely easy to get lost in hard-to-track-down costs.

And when you consider that nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are attributable to client-side misconfigurations — issues like improper access controls, default settings, and other cloud-security posture management (CSPM) oversights — the promise of “easy cloud deployment” can definitely take on a darker tinge.

As Chief Technology Officer for Hyperglance, a top-performing cloud management platform, I’m in the trenches daily with cloud engineers and architects, CISOs, FinOps, DevOps, InfoSec, CFOs and more. Our customers range from universally known brands to high-octane startups to iconic agencies like NASA — so we have a broad and deep view of the everyday issues in cloud computing they face.

10 Challenges of Cloud Computing

Here are the top ten pain points our customers are dealing with, and how we help solve them — and cut their spend, strengthen their security, and take control of their cloud.

1. Cost Chaos

Problem: With unlinked accounts or multi-cloud, there’s no one place to see all your cloud spend. That’s a major problem for your FinOps team.

Solution: Hyperglance’s powerful cost explorer scans your entire inventory and aggregates all your account and subscription expenses in one place. It’ll even offer actionable cost insights and automations to help you squeeze out every drop of waste.

2. Access Violation Damage Control

Problem: A team member accidentally relaxes a security group rule, making you completely vulnerable until a human can respond to the alert. This is a problem that one of our Fortune 500 customers has had to deal with repeatedly.

Solution: Hyperglance automations will quarantine and lock down insecure configurations — averting a potential disaster.

3. Fuzzy Tag Matching

Problem: Tagging is vital to keeping your cloud organized. It’s also incredibly stressful, because cloud tags are hard to use, hard to manage, and easy to mess up. And let’s face it, in the heat of the moment, anyone can misspell a tag.

Solution: Hyperglance has a fuzzy matching engine that can find and correct similar tags, following your own rules, guidelines, and policies.

4. Kubernetes Opacity

Problem: At a cloud level you’re only seeing that there’s a cluster — or certain resources and nodes in the cluster. But that’s not good enough: What you really need is visibility into the cluster itself.

Solution: A Hyperglance visualization gets you deep inside — the control plane, pods, containers, volumes, ingress, and more. We can show you the whole costing signal path — from your container through your Kubernetes cluster onto the host platform — enabling you to take a more holistic and strategic approach to your cloud architecture.

5. (Understandable) SaaS-Phobia

Problem: Other solutions require you to share access to your cloud. Given the constant security risks, that should definitely make you nervous.

Solution: We don’t see or touch your data, ever. Hyperglance is an image-based, self-hosted product that runs exclusively inside your environment. It doesn’t call home — in fact, no internet access is required at all.

6. Compliance

Problem: Compliance is critical in virtually every industry. It’s also a moving target, which makes showing evidence of it at all times a major headache… and worry.

Solution: After ingesting your inventory, Hyperglance will surface an actionable list of cloud compliance insights based on industry best practices and frameworks — helping you comply with crucial security and compliance frameworks, including AWS Well-Architected, Azure Security Benchmark, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, HIPAA, CIS, FedRAMP, PCI DSS, and many more.

7. Right-Sizing Recommendations

Problem: It's not enough to know that something is over-provisioned, the question is what do you downsize it to?

Solution: We look at average CPU usage per core and determine a best-fit instance/VM class that should run that workload “hot” at a desired user-configurable CPU threshold. We even account for the fact that burstable instance types cost you credits for running hot.

8. Dumping Deadweight Costs

Problem: Your cloud spend keeps going up, even though you're careful about what resources you create.

Solution: Hyperglance’s cost rules check for things you might not even be aware of — including deadweight expenses like EBS snapshots or unassigned public IP addresses. We've saved customers thousands a month just by bringing their attention to the money they're needlessly spending.

9. Cloud Cost Cleanup

Problem: Your development team keeps spinning up resources and leaving them there. No doubt it’s driving FinOps crazy!

Solution: With Hyperglance, it’s easy to create a periodic rule to locate those resources and attach a delete automation to clean them up nightly.

10. Customizable Automations?

Problem: Our clients appreciate Hyperglance's powerful advanced search/rules system… but they may want to attach some custom remediations — or to keep control over which use cases trigger automated actions.

Solution: Hyperglance’s cloud automation solution puts the power and control in your hands. Our GitHub is forkable — making it a snap to develop your own remediations — and all of our automations are optional, and deployed as a separate module. You get to decide who can issue which automations.