Optimize your cloud infrastructure assets

ARCUS is a vertical-agnostic platform that presents a rich set of capabilities for automation, operation monitoring and management of your cloud assets.

Best-in-class features to operate, monitor, manage

• Dynamic & Customizable Dashboards
• Multi-Cloud Monitoring & Alerting
• Open API Integration
• Resource Provisioning
• Catalog – IAC-based Provisioning
• Cloud Activity Scheduling
• Automated Spend Forecast
• Advanced Cost Analytics
• Service Request Integration

Easy deployment

• Launch servers from catalogue or image
• Create backups
• Create and attach disk storage
• Configure network security elements, load balancer and static external IP
• Create KeyPair for secure access to servers

Efficient management

• Multi-User and Multi-Cloud Account
• Automated Spend Forecast using AWS Forecast
• Custom monitoring app and database server parameters
• Cloud activity trail
• Group cloud resources as stacks

Effective optimization

• Advanced Cost Analytics
• Budget tracking and spend alerts
• Spend analysis on tagged resources
• Ad-hoc drill-down reports with filters
• Export custom reports

The post ARCUS Cloud Management Platform: Get More From Your Cloud Assets! appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Let us touch a little bit on the angle at which AWS looks at security. AWS Cloud Security clearly states that security is a shared responsibility between AWS, the AWS Partner in charge of managing the environment and the Customer. We feel that it is of prime importance to encourage discussions with the Customers regarding the Shared Responsibility Model followed by AWS Cloud. AWS will be responsible for the Security of the Cloud Infrastructure which comprises of the physical infrastructure (regions/availability zones/edge locations), the hardware that hosts workloads (network, compute, storage, databases) and the software that provides the different functionality of Cloud.

The Customer will be responsible for all and sundry that lies above this layer (i.e.) everything related to the Application. AWS Partners like CK are expected to liaison between the Customer and AWS and also provide consultation on the layers, wherever possible.

Getting back to the various security measures to be designed and enabled from a Customer Standpoint, we will list down the layers and the services/controls put in place.

Continuous Compliance: Best Practices

Account readiness

The first layer (or the bottom-most layer) deals with the Baseline Cloud Account-level security practices setup from an Account-level itself. The following AWS services are enabled by default and I have given a short description of each accordingly.

Securing the Root Account – The IAM Root User needs MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) to be enabled. This is a recommended best Security practice that adds an extra layer of protection on top of the user name and password, and requires an authentication code from the AWS MFA device while attempting a Sign-In

CloudTrail – With CloudTrail, AWS account owners can ensure every API call made to every resource in their AWS account is recorded. CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail enabled, we can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across the AWS infrastructure being managed. CloudTrail provides event history of the AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services

VPC Flow Logs – VPC Flow Logs are enabled allowing us to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in the VPC. Flow log data are also published to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3

Config – AWS Config provides a detailed inventory of the managed AWS resources and their current configuration while continuously recording changes. This helps in evaluating these configurations and changes for compliance with ideal configurations defined by AWS Config Rules

GuardDuty – GuardDuty is a managed cloud security monitoring service that detects behavior or threats that can compromise AWS accounts, resources and workloads. It is a threat detection service that continuously analyzes cloud events in AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow Logs and domain name system (DNS) logs for possible malicious activity

Security Hub – Security Hub provides a comprehensive view of the security alerts and security posture across the AWS account. It is a single place/view point that aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the various security alerts from multiple AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, etc.

Network layer

Designing the Customer’s network security is also imperative and this is carried out at the design stage itself along with the other design considerations as applicable.

AWS components (like S3 & EC2) should not be unnecessarily exposed to the internet ∙ The Subnet Design is verified and carried out as fitting the Customer’s requirement ∙ The Requirements for Public IPs & Elastic IPs are validated

Shield – Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. It provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency

Workload-specific security

• Hardening of the Customer’s Virtual Machines to comply with the CIS Benchmark standards or any other specific standards
• Endpoint security measures
• Storage & Data Encryption using AWS KMS (Key Management Service)

Application layer

WAF – WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect the web applications or APIs against common web exploits and bots that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF provides control over how traffic reaches the applications, we create and customize security rules that control bot traffic and block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting

At CK, we maintain security in all layers via stringent policies set in place. First, we ensure that our customers are sensitized about the nature of the security measures implemented. We aim to create a shared philosophy which communicates that the customers appreciate the way their organization’s security has been extended to the cloud space as well. Moving forward, they will continue to view their cloud servers as an extension of their on-premise data center, with the same responsibilities and expectations in place.

Our Managed Support Services portfolio includes the use of ArcusTM, our indigenous Cloud Management SaaS platform. ArcusTM is built to enable Cloud Engineers and Technology Managers to Migrate, Operate,

Monitor, Manage and Optimize Cloud Infrastructure Assets. Our Managed Services team keeps a close eye on the security posture of the Customer’s account via the Compliance audits which can be enabled via ArcusTM following the recommended best policies. These audits run automatically across the platform, the relevant Policy Audit reports are automated and can be scheduled to be received by our Team and the Customer’s stakeholders as well. While our team conducts manual weekly audits for all our Customer’s accounts as a part of the regular process flow, this effort has been reduced considerably due to the automation and security measures brought around by ArcusTM.

As a final word, while implementing security at each layer is important, CK’s Managed Support Services ensures that the overall environment also remains complaint. The usage of ArcusTM (coupled with the AWS Security Services setup in place) gives us an advantage and Continuous Compliance is achieved accordingly.

The post Continuous Compliance: Best Practices For A “Secure Cloud Infrastructure” appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts. It combines time series data with additional variables to build forecasts for customers looking to leverage their historical data to produce accurate forecasts. It uses Machine Learning to run the data through various prediction models and selects the most accurate one.

Amazon Forecast in Arcus
Cloud Kinetics, Amazon Forecast Partner has gone one step further and has integrated Amazon Forecast in their Cloud Management Platform (CMP) – Arcus. Our Managed Services clients and other customers get access to cloud spend forecasting feature in the Arcus Platform. The feature is built on Amazon Forecast and provides a powerful visualisation of cloud spend across various levels of slice and dice of cost data. This helps business decision-makers to maintain a clear view of their Cloud spends across regions, services and tags.

The in-built Forecast of cost has proved to be a solid game-changer to our customer stakeholders as they are now able to budget their IT spend with confidence based on their own usage patterns across regions, services and cloud providers. – Ramesh Nistala, Chief Product Officer, Cloud Kinetics

The forecast is granular to the level of services used and this helps the business make better budgeting plans as they support their digital transformation initiatives.

Contact us if you are looking to forecast customer demand and related inventory levels, predict key financial metrics such as revenue, expenses, and cash flow across multiple time periods and monetary units, planning staffing levels, advertising inventory, and raw material for manufacturing or for your unique business case where we can help.

The post Cloud Kinetics Recognized As Amazon Forecast Partner By AWS appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Truth be told, forecasting has been a part of business planning for quite some time. Back in the day, this was done using an estimating technique in which the last period’s values were used as a base to arrive at future forecasts. This method typically relied on patterns and recognizable sequences of events to forecast future events. This type of traditional forecasting is understandably basic and has its limitations. For one, it does not adjust the values or make any attempt to establish causal factors. It is also humanly impossible to take disparate sets of data factors over a large period and analyse them accurately.

On the other hand, Machine Learning based forecasting is based on a systematic statistical examination of data representing past observed behaviour of the system to be forecast, including observations of useful predictors outside the system. These innovations have been possible as many algorithms have been developed over the years, ranging from commonly used statistical algorithms like Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), to complex neural network algorithms like CNN-QR and DeepAR+.

Introducing Amazon Forecast

Despite the rapid developments of AI/ML based forecasting, many companies are still not utilizing its power. Organisations usually park such initiatives, either due to lack of appreciation of its utility in business or due to lack of the required resources. Recognizing these limitations, Amazon launched ‘Forecast’ – a fully managed service by AWS that uses machine learning algorithms to deliver highly accurate forecasts. Now with Cloud computing and PaaS services like Amazon Forecast, these traditional limitations are being challenged in a big way. Companies can now easily embark on ML projects using the power of such PaaS services on the cloud, which almost gives access unlimited compute.

Working with Premier AWS Partners like Cloud Kinetics, can further accelerate the adoption by bringing in key elements of automation and visualisation as a value-add on top of the Forecast service, thus adding deep business relevance to such initiatives.

However, companies find that their needs are unique and specific. Therefore, where PaaS tools like Amazon Forecast are a great starting point, they usually need additional solutioning catering to the unique needs of each business case.

Driving an effective onboarding of a workload into Amazon Forecast.
As with any solution, successfully onboarding a workload into Amazon Forecast starts with a clear business problem definition. For example –

I want to forecast sales of products A, B and C for the next quarter by region in order to better optimize my quarterly sales and marketing spends.

Having a good problem statement makes all the difference when it comes to designing the solution.

Secondly, quality and quantity of input data and regular input data updates are crucial for Forecast to be effective. When we consider a machine learning solution, the accuracy of the results achieved is mostly directly proportional to the quality and quantity of input data provided. Therefore, it is advisable to provide maximum amount of time-series data (say 2 to 3 years) on the input side and support the data with related time-series data as well, in order to get the best results. In addition, regular updates of the input data helps the predictor models produce even more accurate results over time and this helps optimize the results achieved further.

Finally, it helps to have a collaborative solution development approach with an experienced partner. For maximizing the value that the Forecast service can bring, a mere usage of the Forecast service in isolation may not always be the most prudent approach. The ability of the team to align the entire solution footprint alongside the Forecast service surely yields measurable business value and results. As an Amazon Forecast Partner, Cloud Kinetics has already worked with many clients to provide an effective Forecast solution for their unique business requirements.

How can Cloud Kinetics Help?

CK has integrated Amazon Forecast into its Cloud Management Platform – Arcus. Through Amazon Forecast, our clients using Arcus platform can perform a detailed Cloud cost analytics and get a spend forecast for the next three months. If you are interested to structure and deploy a forecasting project with Amazon Forecast or want to leverage any other AWS Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning service, get in touch with us at contactus@cloud-kinetics.com

The post The Evolution Of Forecasting – From Estimation To AI appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Why migrate to a closer AWS Region

When would customers have an use case to migrate to a different AWS region ? Some causes may include:

• Data Residency regulations : With regulators in countries framing comprehensive data security laws to protect Information privacy, data residency inside geographical boundaries becomes important.

• Reduced Latency (~30 ms), means faster access and better performance for local users, especially when the business consumers are in-country

• Provides an opportunity for grouping the workloads by Business Unit / Department in multiple accounts for more effective control on budget and charge backs, also very useful during the time of consolidation

• Cleanup & Modernization of existing Resources: Not all resource types are available in all regions, modernization to higher capacity resources for better performance is a strong reason for region migration

Challenges

While migration of any live business application involves meticulous planning and execution considering the Business continuity requirements, the migration within the cloud offers certain inherent benefits. Imaging of machines and data, and easy transfer of data within cloud enable the migration.

However, as with any IT system, the number of custom configurations (network ACL, security rules, system schedules etc) are the ones that need manual attention.

Cloud Kinetics Cloud Management suite, Arcus, enables automated migration of AWS resources across regions in a seamless fashion.

The Arcus- Region Migration service (ARMS) is built to help customers migrate their AWS resources across regions in a seamless, efficient and error-free process. ARMS(Arcus Region Migration Automation) is the migration service backed by Dashboard driven, toolset based approach which has been evolved based on CK experience of helping hundreds of customers migrate into cloud across the globe, with applications, Database instances safely and seamlessly migrated.

ARMS Value Add

ARMS(Arcus Region Migration Automation) helps in the following ways:

• Accurate discovery of the existing assets in the source region using our custom agentless discovery tool with just a read-only access to your cloud account to help us size the engagement and plan effectively.

• Tool driven Migration approach to effectively control risks around migration of not miss out on key pre- requisites. Encompasses templatized approach with packages such as Terraform.

• Dashboard to keep track of migration activities and assets created, with quick summary reports on progress made at any time.

• Experienced Solution Architects and continuously evolving DevOps toolkits integrated into Arcus will ensure our support for seamless and successful migration, handle the aspects of migrating services with minimal impact to application per the business needs.

Next Steps…

Customers happy to see a new AWS region come up in-country or nearby, and wishing to migrate their AWS environment with least disruption, can reach out to CK team at contactus@cloud-kinetics.com.

The post ARMS (Arcus Region Migration Automation) – An Overview appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.