Cloud Governance Services: Strategy, Best Practices and Benefits

What is Cloud Governance?

Rules and regulations apply to every system, process or organization – then why should the cloud be any different? While the cloud has rules related to data security and privacy, there aren’t any pre-set rules or regulations for how businesses should function in the cloud.

Hence, it is important for businesses to create their own set of operations, monitor, and adjust rules for the business to stay competitive and relevant in the market.

Importance of Cloud Governance

Cloud governance is essential for controlling issues mainly in terms of costs, security and asset performance. Through constant changes in the cloud landscape, it is important for businesses to stay relevant and competitive.

Due to the change in IT infrastructure, which was traditionally equipment and hardware, the focus was just to procure the right machinery and set the budget for the operation and maintenance costs. But, with the on-demand cloud services and pay-as-you-go pricing model, it is hard to keep a track of the total spends and before you know, a small fortune would have been drained away on the total costs.

Schedule A Meeting

Cloud governance, with respect to cost control, is about ensuring that everyone has a set agenda and follows the game plan to control costs. This step is paramount in controlling and monitoring the cloud environment and ensure operations are conducted in compliance.

Challenges in cloud governance

Here are some of the biggest challenges encountered while an organization sets out to establish cloud governance:

• Generally, organizations do not establish or set aside resources for ensuring the accountability and safeguarding of confidential information in the cloud
• The IT department is not kept in the picture or consulted when organizations are involved in decision-making for leveraging cloud resources
• Various IT functions do not have the complete picture or accountability of the cloud resources utilized
• Organizations emphasize on encryption but are not implementing on protecting apps
• Lack of proper control over employees and third parties in handling confidential data which makes establishing compliance difficult
• Increased dependency on cloud apps minus the required security training
• Lack of security layers like multi-factor authentication for access to sensitive data

Principles of cloud governance

For the governance of your cloud environment, there are few principles to be followed:

1) Operational governance

This comprises cost-cutting measures where the primary focus is to identify and eliminate unused assets and set up time slots for instances in the various stages of development, testing and QA.

2) Performance management

This comprises optimizing assets for their workloads and upgrading or downgrading assets based on the changing requirements and effective storage of data while keeping the costs in mind.

3) Security management

The latest governance principles for cloud-based solutions look at the various nuances of cloud security and emphasize the importance of encryption, control access, audit trails, application access rules and monitoring nefarious activity.

Best practices for cloud governance

There are numerous practices based on the end vision, goal and objectives of the enterprise. While every business must analyze its resources to determine what works out well, the common governance rules which help shape policy are:

1) Cost management

One of the topmost concerns while moving to the cloud is cost control. It is difficult to juggle adoption pacing, performance and rising costs while migrating. Therefore, organizations must focus on cost control access across all cloud deployments.

2) Creating a governance team

For maximum utilization of resources and effectiveness, a governance team must include employees from across the organization that includes cloud engineers, security leads, and architects. This organization should track issues like status of the software library, security policies, budgets and operations. It is also a great opportunity to assess how each tool is working for the company and look for an alternative.

3) Establish programmatic controls

After identifying your goals, objectives and policies, the job is to establish protocols and processes for monitoring cloud usage. The next step is to understand which employees would have access to cloud assets, the verification of identity, managing the data encryption process and keeping a track of financial aspects that establish the connection between compliance and employee accessibility.

Cloud Governance Vs. Cloud Management

One of the primary steps in establishing a quality multi-cloud strategy is defining the difference between governance and management. There is a need for organizations to set rules and establish procedures on how to control, optimize, operate and offer security for cloud infrastructures while checking on the applications that run in the clouds.

Cloud management comes into the picture while organizing, coordinating and leveraging the resources as per regulatory measures and ensuring the fulfillment of the organization’s objectives.

Cloud governance is the art of defining, monitoring and auditing rules and policies, setting processes, controlling resources and auditing.

Benefits of cloud governance

• Proper processes and workflows can be established and automated while improving efficiency
• Helps innovate to create various opportunities which evolve IT infrastructure at a reasonable cost
• Proper processes that lead to a dynamic and proper IT landscape which brings about change management and quality assurance
• Helps utilize IT assets for maximum benefits at traditional costs

How Veritis helps

Veritis is a North American, IT consulting services provider who offers an effective cloud transition strategy, identifies the right tools and ensures an organizational change with cloud governance in place.

Talk to our cloud architects today!

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