5 Reasons Why You Need Centralized Cloud Configuration

Configuration management is a mess. Keeping track of an increasing number of parameters and secrets for multiple environments, all while continuously deploying, is no small feat. And ensuring all your config data is known, tracked, and understood by Dev, Ops and Security is difficult when teams work in their parallel silos. Centralized cloud configuration is a new concept, read on to learn why.

If your organization is struggling to get everyone on the same page, it’s time to think about how you can sync your cloud configuration at scale. Implementing a centralized cloud configuration platform that ensures your teams are working from a single record of truth has a host of benefits that result in faster deployments, better uptime, and a more resilient security posture.

Let’s explore some of the main perks of centralized cloud configuration to highlight just how critical it is to the overall success of your DevOps organization.

Increased Velocity

Getting new features to your customers faster is always going to be a priority for your organization. Meeting customer demand today requires your teams to work in lockstep with one another in order to minimize delays in development and maximize productivity and efficiency. But when you’re working in increasingly complex environments that each have their own configuration, it makes it difficult to make, track, and understand changes.

To avoid configuration sprawl and enable your teams to work as quickly as possible, you need to embrace centralized configuration solutions that reduce cognitive load tracking down the misconfigurations that interfere with deployment velocity.

Improved Visibility

The root cause of configuration complexity can be chalked up to either configuration data sprawl or tool sprawl. Each environment and tool you work with has its own set of configuration parameters and secrets. When you lack a globally available abstracted single record of configuration truth deployments get complicated real quick.

Understanding the impact of your configuration changes is important, and a centralized cloud configuration platform helps your teams do just that. Having greater visibility into your existing config settings enables you to track and manage all changes, whether they’re relevant to security, performance, cost management, or other domains. 

With a greater understanding of how your various tools and systems work together, your centralized cloud configuration solutions provide the information you need to optimize your operations and avoid downtime or a security breach.

Optimized Security Posture

Not only does a centralized cloud configuration platform enable your teams to produce better work more quickly, it also minimizes your organization’s likelihood of being exposed to security breaches. Inadequate secrets management coupled with exponentially increasing APIs has left many companies scrambling to secure their sensitive information and keep it from falling into the wrong hands. In the last 18 months alone, 79% of companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach, with 43% of them experiencing 10 or more.

Clearly, addressing these preventable threats should be top-of-mind for your organization moving forward. When you consolidate your disparate configuration management systems through a centralized platform, important tasks such as enforcing access controls, tracking cert expirations, and rotating passwords are needed to ensure the highest security standards.

Optimizing your security posture is a must in the wake of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. Companies like CloudTruth provide you with one place to manage passwords, API keys, certificates, and other sensitive data to inject secrets into build, deploy, and run time pipelines. This ensures your organization’s most sensitive data is safe and sound

Better Uptime

Configuration activities are becoming more distributed and decentralized. As such, your organization needs the proper tools in place to enable teams to run at their own pace. In order to ensure high availability and avoid extended downtime, employees need to be able to proactively address configuration issues quickly and effectively.

Maintaining your applications’ availability starts with having visibility into the state of your infrastructure. With a centralized platform for configuration management, you’re better able to prevent misconfigurations before they cause downtime or recover from an outage faster.

Systems tend to collapse when under high usage load. When user demand spikes, it’s imperative to be able to quickly know when configuration values are changing, by whom and for what reason.

Uptime may not be everything when it comes to the growth and success of your organization, but it’s undeniably important in satisfying your audience and bolstering your brand reputation. Make it easier for your teams to keep apps available and operational to your customers by conquering configuration complexity through a centralized platform.

More Cost & Time Savings

Naturally, increasing your uptime and security posture results in overall velocity and team happiness. Enabling your teams to fire on all cylinders and spend more time adding value and less time searching for answers equates to more revenue for your organization.

Failing to centralize configuration management tools can result in unexpected costs in terms of time, money, and manpower as your team works to track down security issues or restore availability. Having everything under one umbrella enables your organization to work through problems faster and achieve greater agility.

Ready to Conquer Cloud Configuration Complexity?

Getting a top-down, cross-cutting view of how your system is configured and what is changing in real-time is easier said than done. Combatting misconfiguration issues requires you to implement tools that enable effortless scaling and quicker problem-solving.

Tools like CloudTruth.

Our platform unifies access and visibility into your organization’s infrastructure, application, and secrets configuration data. By leveraging CloudTruth, companies can manage their parameters, templates, environment variables, and secrets, all from one central location.

Best of all, CloudTruth works to strengthen your existing tools and systems, meaning you won’t have to start your tech stack from scratch when you work with us.

Software developers and CloudOps teams rely on CloudTruth to ensure uptime, security, and team velocity across the board. Learn more about our solutions or register for a free demo to see what CloudTruth can unlock for your organization.