Cloud Governance

Cloud Governance, a framework that helps govern the use of cloud services and helps organisations yield maximum benefits from cloud. Undoubtedly, the access to cloud has made the life and running of businesses exceptionally convenient. Cloud Governance lets people use the services and technology while ensuring safety, managing cost, and accelerating deployment . It’s a framework that enables regulating and controlling of services through set processes, standards and policies which need to be followed for the on-boarding process and management of cloud services.

In order to accelerate IT modernization, cloud adoption is increasing rapidly. Cloud Governance is a foundational element for any cloud adoption to be successful.

What we do

5 Disciplines of Cloud Governance

With any cloud platform, there are common governance disciplines that help inform policies and align toolchains. CloudifyOps will help you structure an organization-wide cloud framework based on the five disciplines of Cloud Governance.

Cost Management

Maintaining costs is the major and primary concern for cloud users. This discipline focuses on putting governance on spending and controlling the costs of cloud users. The major challenge that businesses face is that with the implementation of cloud solutions and the concern of costs associated with it. It’s the cost of moving from capital expense model to an operating expense model.

Security Baseline

Security is a complex topic and is unique to each company. Once the security requirements are established, cloud governance policies and enforcement are applied across the data, network asset configuration. Security baseline discipline is targeted towards identifying the key reservations of the client and moving them to cloud platforms and thus helping them address all those concerns.

Identity Baseline

Apart from cost management and security issues the third most asked service by the customers in the cloud is that of identity. It’s well realised that the way identity is being implemented today will need to be reviewed while moving to cloud platforms. One of the primary security perimeter in the cloud is Identity. This discipline focuses on ensuring consistency across the cloud adoption efforts.

Resource consistency

Operations of cloud depend on the consistent resource configuration. With cloud governance tooling, resources can be configured consistently to manage risks relating to onboarding, drift, discoverability and recovery. The purpose of this discipline is to establish policies related to operations.

Deployment acceleration

Governance practices are improved through centralisation, standardisation and consistency approaches to deployment and configuration. Cloud-governance tooling lets businesses create a cloud factor that can accelerate deployment activities. This discipline is targeted towards establishing policies for asset configuration and deployment.

How To Implement Cloud Governance?

The three basic phases of implementing cloud governance are:

Awareness Stage

Organisations in this stage have no cloud structure and they still depend on the manual deployment of assets. They know the fact that they require complete transition to the cloud but they have minimal integrations.
Early Adoption

At this juncture, organisations have their policies developed which matches their processes. At this stage, they have their costs and architectural details planned out. Organisations experience a rapid cloud deployment process.
Mature Adoption

At this final stage organisations yield the results of their practices from their previous phases. Cloud governance plays a vital role at this stage, enhancing security and compliance.

Cloud Governance is the key to develop along with these three phases. In the initial awareness stage, companies need to audit their existing systems such that they are capable of developing a clear vision of what their ideal cloud environment shall look like. Once the plan is all set the next is working towards the Early Adoption Phase. At this stage, it’s important for teams to refer and build on their plan for ensured deployments. The third and the last phase is of the Mature Adoption Phase which depends on the cloud governance for the smooth running of the framework.

Benefits of Cloud Governance

Developing and implementing cloud governance is not something that can be built in a day’s time. It requires time and effort to collaborate across the teams to ensure the final product is complete. Cloud Governance can yield long term benefits for you.

Controlled Access

Your Cloud Governance plan can be built based on certain limits like who can access your specific asset or software management to ensure your cloud ecosystem is safe. You wouldn’t want your IT applications and initiatives tampering with your sensitive architecture. Having controlled access to your critical assets helps in enhancing the reliability of your cloud processes.

Reduced Security Risks

Once you have decided on moving your data to the cloud, it becomes even more important for you to develop security measures to ensure the protection of your data. No doubt that having your data on the cloud makes it easier to access, it too brings along risks of data breaches. That’s when Cloud Governance comes into play. Cloud Governance Plan can help you identify the security issues in your system, helps plan to migrate risks, and also helps you to establish metrics such that you can gauge the impact of security measures.

Lowered Costs

Cloud Governance lets you shift your workflows from analog to automated. No need of going back to those time-consuming manual processes, cloud governance framework allows you to build and automate everything right from budget to even your policies. Cloud Governance reduces the manpower needed to enforce your cloud governance which in turn reduces your costs.