Cloud Infrastructure Management: Best Practices and How to Assess Your Needs

For organizations operating complex cloud environments or shifting critical applications into the cloud, infrastructure management plays a crucial role in optimizing application performance, mitigating security vulnerabilities, controlling costs, and maximizing the ROI of cloud initiatives.

Here, we’re sharing some of the most important best practices and areas of focus for cloud infrastructure management in 2025, along with a simple framework to help you assess your cloud computing needs.

Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure: Four Core Components

Cloud infrastructure management involves the processes, tools, and strategies used by CloudOps teams and cloud engineers to configure, monitor, optimize, and secure cloud-based infrastructure and resources within cloud computing environments.

The four main building blocks that enable cloud environments to function are:

1. Compute

Cloud-based compute infrastructure provides the processing power and memory needed to run application workloads in the cloud. Virtual machines, containerization services like Docker and Kubernetes, serverless computing services like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, and High-Performance Computing (HPC clusters) are all examples of cloud-based compute infrastructure that can be used to power applications. These compute resources enable scalable and efficient application execution in cloud environments.

2. Storage

Cloud storage infrastructure consists of cloud-based file storage, block storage, and object storage services that provide scalable, resilient, and cost-effective data storage in the cloud. These services support a wide range of applications, including traditional relational databases, as well as data lakes, data warehouses, and data lakehouse solutions.

3. Networking

Cloud networking infrastructure includes virtual networks, load balancers, firewalls, virtual private networks (VPNs), virtual private clouds (VPCs), content delivery networks (CDNs), edge computing services, proxy servers, gateways, and other components that facilitate secure, high-performance connectivity for cloud workloads.

4. Virtualization

Virtualization enables organizations to run applications and workloads by abstracting the physical infrastructure into virtual resources. Managing cloud virtualization includes overseeing virtual machines (VMs), containers, software-defined networks (SDNs), virtualized storage, and other virtual infrastructure components that support scalable, flexible cloud environments. 

Organizations must efficiently provision, configure, monitor, secure and optimize all four components of cloud infrastructure to effectively control costs while meeting key business objectives.

Cloud Infrastructure Management for Three Main Cloud Delivery Models

The three main models of cloud service delivery are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). One of the core differences between the three models is which party bears the responsibility for managing the underlying cloud infrastructure.

In the IaaS model, public cloud service providers offer cloud computing infrastructure to customers over the Internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. Public cloud providers maintain the data centers where the infrastructure and hardware is hosted, while customers are responsible for provisioning, configuring, and securing access to their infrastructure according to their business needs.

In the PaaS model, cloud vendors provide a fully managed software development platform that allows developers to build, test, and deploy applications without managing the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider manages the underlying cloud-based infrastructure, along with the operating system, middleware, and runtimes that power the platform, so customers can focus their efforts on software development.

In the SaaS model, third-party vendors offer complete software applications to customers over the Internet, usually on a subscription basis. SaaS solutions are hosted on public cloud infrastructure that’s managed by the provider. The provider handles the provisioning, configuration, security, and maintenance, allowing customers to simply consume the software.

Six Best Practices to Optimize Your Cloud Infrastructure Management

Implement a Robust Cloud Governance Framework

A solid cloud governance framework is essential for maintaining control, ensuring security, and optimizing costs. Effective governance helps streamline operations, minimize risks, and promote transparency across cloud resources. Best practices include:

• Setting clear security, compliance, and provisioning guidelines to control cloud usage and maintain standards
• Using role-based access control (RBAC), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and least privilege access to mitigate the risk of unauthorized changes
• Establishing standardized naming conventions and tagging policies for better cloud resource visibility, management, and cost allocation
• Leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate deployments enforce consistent configurations and governance policies
• Using cost tracking tools and setting alerts to monitor spending
• Enforcing encryption, monitoring, and firewall policies to protect data

Automate Infrastructure Management and Scaling

Automating cloud infrastructure management helps eliminate manual errors, streamline operations, and reduce operational overhead. By leveraging IaC, auto-scaling policies, and container orchestration, companies can dynamically adjust resources to meet changing demand, enhancing system resilience and ensuring consistency across deployments.

Some of the best opportunities for task automation in cloud infrastructure management include:

• Automating infrastructure provisioning with IaC tools like Azure Bicep or AWS CloudFormation
• Implementing automatic resource scaling or load balancing to seamlessly scale instances based on workload demand without manual intervention
• Automating data back-up and disaster recovery processes to efficiently preserve critical data and rapidly restore operations after a service interruption
• Implementing CI/CD pipeline automation to accelerate code testing, deployment, and infrastructure updates
• Using cloud orchestration tools to orchestrate workloads across multiple clouds in a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment
• Automating security patches and vulnerability scanning to support cloud security and enforce encryption policies

Monitoring and Optimizing Performance

Continuous monitoring is necessary to uncover areas for performance improvement, and optimizing application performance is essential for delivering a seamless, high-quality customer experience, particularly for customer-facing applications hosted in the cloud. Poorly optimized applications can result in low availability, high latency, and a degraded user experience. On the other hand, well-optimized applications backed by a strong cloud infrastructure deliver fast, reliable performance that enhances customer satisfaction.

To ensure applications run at peak performance, cloud infrastructure management best practices should include both proactive monitoring and optimization:

• Use cloud-native monitoring tools like AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or Google Cloud Operations Suite to track application health and resource performance
• Leverage application performance monitoring (APM) tools like Datadog APM and New Relic to track end-user experience, monitor applications/microservices performance
• Ensure optimal connectivity with tools like AWS VPC Flow Logs and Azure Network Watcher to monitor network traffic patterns
• Implement auto-scaling to dynamically and automatically scale resources based on demand for applications in real-time
• Deploy load balancers to efficiently distribute network traffic and avoid bottlenecks
• Provision content delivery networks (CDNs) to cache assets closer to users and reduce application latency for geographically diverse users
• Implement caching to accelerate application performance by reducing the number of database calls
• Implement edge computing to move data processing capacity closer to users, reducing network congestion and improving application performance

Efficiently Manage Cloud Security and Compliance

Organizations use cloud infrastructure to transmit, process, and store sensitive data, including personally identifiable information (PII) of employees and customers, payment data, health data, and more. 

Implementing consistent and effective security practices across all cloud assets is critical when it comes to protecting sensitive data, meeting compliance standards, and ensuring business continuity. Organizations can prioritize security in their cloud infrastructure management efforts by:

• Implementing security measures like identify verification and MFA to control access to cloud resources
• Encrypting data at rest and in transit to prevent unauthorized access
• Use cloud-native security tools like AWS Security Hub, Azure Security Center, and Google Security Command Center to centralize security findings, manage security risks, and monitor for suspicious activity in real-time
• Deploying security tools with real-time monitoring and security logging capabilities that make it easier to detect suspicious network activity
• Deploying web application firewalls (WAFs) to block malicious network traffic
• Automating routine security patching and vulnerability scans

Optimize Costs

Cloud cost optimization is essential in cloud infrastructure management, especially as cloud resources scale.

While under-provisioning cloud resources (e.g. data storage, compute instances, etc.) can result in poor workload performance, data loss, and negative customer experiences, over-provisioning those same resources results in high excess costs that degrade the ROI of cloud transformation initiatives.

In cloud infrastructure management, efficient cost optimization strategies include:

• Right-sizing compute instances based on actual business needs
• Using tiered data storage systems and to minimize data storage costs
• Leveraging reserved instances instead of on-demand instances for long-term workloads
• Leveraging spot instances to save costs by accessing unused E2C capacity in the AWS cloud
• Leveraging cost monitoring tools like AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, or Google Cloud Billing to track costs and identify areas for optimization

Integrating FinOps practices can take these efforts further, empowering organizations to ensure efficient cloud resource utilization, optimize costs, and foster financial accountability across finance, operations, and engineering teams.

Perform Regular Cloud Audits

Performing regular (monthly or quarterly) audits of your cloud security posture, infrastructure/service configurations, and spending can help you proactively identify security vulnerabilities, misconfigured assets, and cost inefficiencies that endanger sensitive data, harm application performance, or negatively impact ROI.

We recommend several different types of cloud infrastructure audits to help safeguard and optimize your cloud operations:

• Security audits that involve reviewing Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, user permissions, and user access records
• Configuration audits that involve reviewing the configuration status of ports, admin interfaces, databases, compute instances and other assets
• Compliance audits to assess the organization’s compliance with any applicable regulatory guidelines or standards
• Cloud cost audits to identify and mitigate wasted cloud spending

Cloud Infrastructure Management: Special Considerations for Diverse Cloud Environments

Private cloud environments are typically used by organizations to run workloads or applications that require strict data security, regulatory compliance, or high performance.

In managing private cloud infrastructure, several considerations are essential:

• Capacity Planning and Resource Management: Unlike public cloud environments, which scale dynamically, private cloud environments require careful allocation of compute, storage, and networking resources. Organizations need to ensure that these resources are efficiently managed to avoid underutilization or over-provisioning, which could either lead to performance bottlenecks or unnecessary cost.
• Hardware Lifecycle Management: Since private cloud environments are typically based on dedicated hardware, organizations must plan for infrastructure upgrades and maintenance to avoid performance degradation due to aging hardware. Regular hardware assessments and timely upgrades are crucial to ensure high availability and continued performance.
• Performance Optimization Without Autoscaling: Since private cloud environments lack the dynamic scaling features of public clouds, teams must focus on optimizing workloads and leveraging software-defined automation tools. This is to ensure resources are efficiently balanced and demand spikes are handled effectively without requiring manual intervention.

Public Cloud

Public cloud environments are hosted on cloud infrastructure managed by providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, offering access to scalable resources across multiple regions and availability zones.

When managing public cloud infrastructure, it’s critical to address several key considerations:

• Shared Responsibility Model: Public cloud providers operate on a shared responsibility model, meaning they are responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure, while customers are responsible for securing their applications, data, and resources in the cloud. Organizations must clearly understand this division to ensure they are meeting their security and compliance obligations.
• Latency and Multi-Region Availability: Public cloud environments offer the flexibility of deploying applications across multiple regions and availability zones. This allows businesses to optimize latency and ensure high availability by serving customers from the region closest to them. Managing deployments across multiple regions also provides disaster recovery and resilience in case of an outage.
• Cost Management and Avoiding Overruns: As public cloud resources are billed based on usage, it’s essential for organizations to actively manage their cloud costs. This includes optimizing resource provisioning, leveraging autoscaling to match demand, and using reserved instances for long-term workloads to reduce expenses.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud environments combine on-prem or third-party hosted private cloud infrastructure with public cloud infrastructure and resources in a mixed computing environment, enabling use cases like cloud bursting and cloud disaster recovery.

Consider the following when managing a hybrid cloud:

• Workload Placement: Effective workload placement ensures that resources are used efficiently, optimizing both performance and cost. So, it’s essential to carefully determine which workloads should remain on-premises (for reasons such as security, compliance, or performance) and which should be moved to the public cloud to leverage its elasticity.
• Unified Security and Identity Management: A consistent identity and access management (IAM) strategy is crucial in a hybrid cloud environment. Implementing a unified security and identity management program allows for seamless authentication and secure access across both private and public cloud environments, ensuring data protection and compliance across the entire infrastructure.
• Disaster Recovery Strategy: Developing a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that spans both public and private cloud environments is vital. This involves planning for failover between private and public clouds to ensure data consistency, minimize downtime, and maintain high availability across platforms, even in the event of an outage or failure.

Multicloud

Multicloud computing environments incorporate infrastructure and resources from more than one public cloud provider. Using resources from multiple clouds helps organizations stay flexible and control costs while avoiding vendor lock-in.

When managing a multicloud environment, organizations need to address the following:

• Avoiding Data Egress Costs: Moving data between different cloud providers can result in significant data egress charges. Managing and minimizing these costs requires a strategic approach to workload placement and data movement. This can be mitigated through effective cloud architecture design, where data stays within the same cloud provider for as long as possible, reducing the need for costly data transfers.
• Cross-Cloud Security and Compliance: Ensuring consistent security and compliance across multiple cloud platforms is crucial in a multicloud environment. Organizations must implement unified security policies and governance frameworks to enforce consistent identity management, access controls, encryption, and regulatory compliance across all clouds.
• Optimizing Workload Distribution: Some workloads may be more cost-effective or perform better on a specific cloud provider due to factors such as pricing, resource availability, or specialized services. By carefully evaluating workload performance and cost-efficiency, organizations can distribute workloads across multiple clouds in a way that maximizes both performance and cost savings.
• Unified Cloud Management and Governance: Effective multicloud management requires standardizing governance frameworks across platforms. This includes integrating multi-cloud monitoring, observability, and governance tools to streamline operations, ensure consistent policies, and maintain control over resource usage, security, and compliance.

Assessing Your Cloud Computing Needs in Seven Steps

Shifting operations into the cloud can feel like a daunting process, especially for organizations lacking cloud expertise or a clear pathway to cloud adoption. To help you imagine a cloud-based future for your business, we’ve crafted a simple seven-step process for assessing your cloud computing needs.

Working through this process will help you align your cloud transformation with clear business objectives and position you to maximize the value of your cloud investments.

1. Assess Business Goals

The first step to assessing your cloud computing needs is to clearly define your business goals. What business outcomes do you hope to realize by adopting cloud computing and shifting workloads into the cloud? Some of the most common business objectives driving cloud adoption for our customers include:

• Reducing IT costs by limiting CapEx and increasing OpEx
• Enhancing infrastructure scalability to accommodate seasonal demand or rapid business growth
• Enhancing security and compliance
• Delivering improved experiences to geographically diverse customers

2. Evaluate Current Infrastructure

The next critical step in assessing your cloud computing needs is to evaluate your current IT infrastructure to determine which systems, applications, or workloads should be moved to the cloud and which should remain on-premises. This process involves analyzing your current setup, including servers, storage devices, network infrastructure, workloads, and legacy applications, to understand how each component aligns with your business objectives.

A key consideration here is determining which workloads and applications are best suited for specific cloud environments—public, private, hybrid, or multicloud—based on factors like performance, security, compliance requirements, and cost.

3. Determine Infrastructure/Resource Requirements

Once you have identified which applications and workloads should be moved into the cloud, you can begin to estimate the resources needed to support those workloads. This step should involve answering:

• What are the CPU, GPU, and RAM requirements for my applications based on their workload intensity?
• How much storage will my applications need? 
• Should I use block storage, object storage, or file storage, and how will I manage data growth?
• Will my applications experience predictable or unpredictable traffic spikes, and how can I scale resources efficiently?
• Do I need auto-scaling capabilities to handle fluctuations dynamically, or can I use reserved instances or scheduled scaling for cost savings?
• Should I leverage serverless computing or Kubernetes-based auto-scaling for microservices architectures?

4. Identify Security and Compliance Needs

Concurrently with determining the resource requirements for your cloud-based applications and workloads, you should also look at your security and compliance needs. Consider what security controls and software you will implement to efficiently monitor the security status of your cloud deployment, manage security risks to your data, and ensure compliance with applicable data security/privacy regulations (e.g. EU GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS).

5. Consider Disaster Recovery and Backup

Data back-ups and disaster recovery are a critical aspect of your overall cloud strategy. Strong protocols around data back-up and disaster recovery help you prevent data loss, recover quickly from unplanned service interruptions, and avoid unplanned operational downtime.

As part of this step, you should think about crafting a data back-up and disaster recovery strategy that aligns with your business needs. The most important considerations here include:

• Which data should be backed up?
• How frequently are data back-ups required to avoid unacceptable data loss?
• What are acceptable Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) for mission-critical systems?

6. Establish Budget and Cost Goals

At this point in your assessment, you should have enough information to start estimating the cost of your cloud transformation strategy and establishing a monthly cloud expenses budget. A diligent approach to cloud infrastructure management (following the best practices in this blog) can help your organization allocate cloud resources more efficiently to minimize your cloud costs and maximize the ROI of your cloud strategy.

7. Analyze Team Skills and Expertise

A successful cloud adoption journey requires a skilled team that not only has experience with cloud implementations but also the expertise to continuously manage, optimize, and monitor cloud infrastructure. As you assess your team’s readiness, it’s essential to evaluate their ability to handle the ongoing demands of cloud management, including performance tuning, cost optimization, and 24/7 monitoring.

You can address skill gaps in your cloud implementation by:

• Hiring new team members with the required cloud skills and experience, including expertise in cloud infrastructure management, optimization, and continuous monitoring
• Training your existing team members through certification programs offered by hyperscale cloud providers like Azure and AWS
• Partnering with a third-party vendor like TierPoint with a proven track record of successful cloud implementations

Simplify Your Cloud Solutions with TierPoint

Whether you’re planning a major cloud transformation for your organization or looking to optimize an existing environment with effective cloud infrastructure management, TierPoint is your trusted partner for cloud services and solutions. 

Our team of cloud advisors delivers unparalleled expertise in cloud adoption, application migration, and cloud infrastructure management, with hundreds of technical certifications from both Azure and AWS, and a proven track record of delivering exceptional guidance and results for our customers.

Read our strategic guide to cloud computing for more information about conducting a cloud readiness assessment, choosing the right cloud environment for your needs, and how to migrate to the cloud. Or, book an intro call with us to discover how partnering with TierPoint can help you accelerate your cloud transformation journey and how our experience in cloud infrastructure management can help you minimize costs and maximize the value of your cloud initiatives.