As Companies Shift to Remote Work, Cloud Management Is More Important than Ever

According to recent polls, at least two thirds of American employees have shifted to working remotely as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. While limited remote work is hardly a new concept, this large-scale shift has created a whole host of unprecedented challenges for many companies. From building out remote onboarding processes, to mitigating security risks for employees accessing sensitive data, to enabling remote collaboration and development, leaders in every industry and function have been working tirelessly to set up new tools and processes to help their teams adapt to this new normal. And while the specifics of these solutions vary tremendously, they’ve all got one thing in common: any cloud-based solution for remote work is going to require a proactive management system in order to be effective.

One of the biggest reasons that companies are investing in cloud management systems is to make it possible to resolve problems quickly and efficiently. As development teams shift to a fully remote workflow, maintaining visibility into relevant bugs and configuration errors is vital to ensure that everyone can continue to be productive. With a configuration intelligence solution, key stakeholders can access the information they need to identify and fix issues, without derailing the entire team every time something goes wrong.

While troubleshooting bugs has always been an important component of the development process, the transition to remote work makes it even more vital. Problems that would have been resolved with a quick conversation now have the potential to linger undiscovered for days or even weeks. Engineers are now relying on new tools and devices to do their work, complicating many aspects of the development process and creating new opportunities for mistakes large and small. To stay ahead of these challenges, forward-thinking companies are turning to cloud management solutions that offer real-time, actionable visibility into their new cloud services.

In addition to offering a smoother incident resolution process, effective cloud management tools also help to ensure that security and QA standards continue to be met as organizations shift to a new remote setup. With a fully distributed team, it can be difficult to track changes made to security configuration files. Real-time monitoring of your cloud systems makes it possible for security teams to keep an eye on these essential configurations, and raise the alarm as soon as something looks off. Similarly, visibility into the configurations of key systems will help QA teams to ensure that everything going into the end product meets stated requirements, and it will give them easy access to identify and resolve any issues that do come up before the damage is done. 

Finally, greater visibility and control over your cloud-based systems will enable your newly remote team to push to production faster and with greater confidence. As the pandemic has shut down huge swaths of the economy, businesses in many industries have come grinding to a halt. And in industries that do continue to function, the shift to remote work has forced companies large and small to transform their operations overnight. In order to overcome these challenges, cloud customers must invest in a configuration management solution that gives them the confidence they need to continue providing their customers with top-notch products and services. 

With visibility into all of your systems and configurations, as well as insight into who is changing what and when, development teams become empowered to push code to production faster and with fewer bugs. Instead of manually checking (and re-checking) that all settings are configured correctly, engineers can focus on their actual work, increasing the efficiency of the entire team. Plus, in a time of great uncertainty, with teams unable to meet in person and the future unclear, the ability to confidently deliver value to the customer will provide a much-needed morale boost to everyone, from junior developers to senior leadership.

Gone are the days of the water-cooler chat or the lunch-break catchup. As teams dive headfirst into the world of fully remote development — many for the first time in their lives — effective communication and system oversight have become more challenging than ever before. That’s why many companies are investing in solutions like CloudTruth to ensure visibility into their complex, cloud-based systems. 

Interested in learning more? For more information about our configuration intelligence platform and how we’re supporting remote teams all around the world, check out our website at www.cloudtruth.com.