Know Your Cloud Infrastructure with Detailed Architecture Diagrams
As the dependencies on cloud computing increase, cloud architects and IT professionals rely on documentation and cloud architecture diagrams to properly monitor their environments. Keeping an updated architecture diagram is a tedious and highly important task.
Why do we Use Architecture Diagrams?
There are many reasons why cloud architects use architecture diagrams. The main reason is to be able to easily visualize a complex cloud infrastructure. Other reasons include cloud security, tracking changes, and viewing vulnerabilities.
Architects and other IT professionals that work in companies that use enterprise clouds rely on cloud diagrams repeatably. The frequency and need to update the architecture diagrams depend on the size of the cloud, and company best practices. It is, however, recommended to always keep your cloud documentation updated. Helping you in case of problems that might arise with the cloud provider or security threats.
Why Should You Document Your Cloud Environment?
There are multiple reasons why you should document your cloud environment, and they are not only about security.
- Easily keep track of the deployment histories
- To develop automatic administration tools for your cloud environment, a normalized extraction of the components of your environment will be necessary.
- Be aware of all the security holes you have in your environment.
- To limit the number of personnel who have access to the portal.
- To help you in the process of being ISO certified, audited, or for any other certification.
Are Architecture Diagrams Created by Hand?
Many cloud architects built their diagrams by hand and are constantly updating them manually. As you can imagine, this practice is very time-consuming and tedious. The work is also prone to human errors, which can cause headaches for team members who rely on the diagrams.
A better practice is to use software like Cloudockit to automatically generate the architecture diagrams. Cloudockit will detect all the components in a cloud environment and deliver an editable diagram. By doing so, the cloud architect will save countless hours and avoid making severe errors. For large cloud architectures, the diagrams can be generated overnight to be ready to observe the next morning.
How to Use Diagrams to Monitor Your Cloud Infrastructure
Automatically generated cloud diagrams from Cloudockit come with a large amount of information attached to each shape. The diagrams also include warning icons related to the compliance rules you choose to track or custom-built.
The overall diagram will give you a full view a complete view of all your workloads and the links between them. These can be organized by resource groups, workloads, applications, location, or the preferred way, tailored to your needs.
If you require more details, data is included for each shape. The information given includes the size, OS, location, number of cores, memory, and much more depending on the type of workload. Shape data can be used to know exactly what you are looking at without the need to reference the technical documentation or portal. This will save you countless hours!
Even more importantly, you can monitor compliance rules directly within your architecture diagram. Cloudockit diagrams feature visible warning icons where a potential misconfiguration or security threat can emerge.
Do You Truly Know Your IT?
The Cloud is only one aspect of your IT ecosystem. Having complete visibility of your IT asset inventory is an extremely tedious but important job. Thankfully, tools like Lansweeper can help you discover and manage your IT inventory. Just like Cloudockit with automated architecture diagrams, Lansweeper will automatically scan your IT infrastructure to discover all IT, OT, and IoT, eliminating blind spots. Using such tools will enable you to gain complete control of your IT estate.