3 Challenges of Azure Architecture Documentation – and How to Solve Them

Cloud adoption has accelerated significantly over the past few years, with 94% of enterprises using cloud services. Nearly 70% of enterprise infrastructure is now cloud-based, and 92% of businesses have or are implementing a multi-cloud strategy. Of the many cloud providers, Microsoft Azure is growing the fastest – 70% of organizations worldwide now use Azure for their cloud services.

And it’s no wonder why – the Azure cloud platform offers more than 200 services for solving today’s business challenges, from networking to storage to content delivery. Organizations can leverage Azure to build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises or at the edge using a wide variety of tools and frameworks.

But the more a business uses Azure for various applications and services, the more complex the infrastructure becomes. Managing Azure cloud assets can become extremely challenging, leading to a number of problems:

- Overspending: When an organization migrates to Azure, their costs may increase due to idle or abandoned resources, over-provisioning or a failure to take advantage of on-demand pricing. On average, companies are overspending on their cloud infrastructures by 24%.
- Lack of visibility: While Azure provides users with the tools they need to secure their infrastructure, it’s impossible to protect assets you don’t know you have. As the cloud infrastructure expands, keeping track of every cloud asset is essential to reducing risk.
- Non-compliance: Storing sensitive data in the cloud requires compliance with data privacy and protection standards. While Azure has specific compliance certifications and audits it must pass, every organization is still on the hook for meeting industry-specific security requirements. Without proper documentation to track and enforce your compliance rules, it’s impossible to ensure continuous compliance, especially as your Azure infrastructure grows.

All of these problems can be addressed with complete and accurate Azure infrastructure documentation – but that in itself is no easy feat. Let’s examine why.

Problems with Creating Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Historically, IT teams have had to create cloud infrastructure documentation manually – a painstaking and tedious task that almost always produces inaccurate results. And, it costs a lot of time and money – research shows that 51% of IT budgets will go to developing and operating cloud-based systems development and operations by 2025.

Another challenge is Azure environments are constantly evolving, and documentation becomes obsolete almost as soon as it’s created. Resources are often deployed manually across geographical locations and managed by different teams across the organization. Subscriptions may vary between business units, with configurations set to support different types of workloads. If you lack cloud infrastructure visualization, it’s impossible to keep track of all of these changes.

Finally, cloud documentation is typically highly technical in nature, making it difficult to share the information with certain teams and stakeholders, who may find it hard to understand. This technical complexity slows decision-making.

Are you ready to start properly documenting your Azure architecture?

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What is a Cloud Architecture Diagram?

A Cloud Architecture Diagram provides visual documentation of an organization’s cloud services. It can be used to track the various components and moving parts of your Azure architecture so you can see its current state, understand all of the dependencies and relationships between cloud assets, track changes, plan for migrations and updates, manage costs, and troubleshoot service availability and security issues, quickly and easily.

Advances in cloud asset management software have made it possible to auto-generate complete and accurate Azure architecture diagrams in minutes that can be shared across teams and stakeholders to keep them informed. This eliminates manual tasks while ensuring documentation is accurate and up to date at all times.

Cloudockit – Azure Architecture Documentation Made Easy

Cloudockit uses native Azure APIs to retrieve the metadata it needs to auto-generate Azure architecture diagrams and technical documentation, providing full visibility across your Azure environment. You can choose from several built-in templates – full, essential, billing, and changes – to accommodate the various roles across an organization. You can even create an executive summary for your C-level manager, providing a big-picture, easy-to-understand overview of your environment, cloud spending and compliance rules.

Cloudockit makes it easy to:

- Fully understand your cloud with auto-generated architecture diagrams and technical documentation.
- Edit your Azure architecture diagrams to provide the desired level of detail.
- Create a complete Word, PDF, or HTML document and continuously update it with accurate information.
- Continuously monitor changes across your Azure environment, while saving time and energy.
- Extract normalized cloud asset data and dependencies as an Excel or JSON file, and feed it to a third-party application for effortless integration.

Plus it’s easy – and free – to get started. Try Cloudokit today and see how fast and simple it is to create thorough, accurate Azure architecture diagrams and Azure documentation.

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