The cloud creates new paradigms for the technologies that support the business. These new paradigms also change how those technologies are adopted, managed, and governed. When entire datacenters can be virtually torn down and rebuilt with one line of code executed by an unattended process, we have to rethink traditional approaches. This is especially true for governance.
The cloud creates new paradigms for the technologies that support the business. These new paradigms also change how those technologies are adopted, managed, and governed. As the cloud estate changes over time, so do cloud governance processes and policies.
It’s important to establish a rough vision of the end state of your journey before taking the first step. The following infographic provides a frame of reference for the end state.
The Cloud Adoption Framework governance model identifies key areas of importance during the journey. Each area relates to different types of risks the company must address as it adopts more cloud services. Within this framework, the governance guide identifies required actions for the cloud governance team. Because governance requirements will change throughout the cloud adoption journey, a different approach to governance is required. Business results are expected more quickly and smoothly. IT governance must also move quickly and keep pace with business demands to stay relevant during cloud adoption and avoid “shadow IT.”
The following diagram shows a simple governance MVP and three governance iterations. During the iterations, additional corporate policies are defined to remediate new risks. The Deployment Acceleration discipline then applies those changes across each deployment.
With any cloud platform, there are common governance disciplines that help inform policies and align toolchains. These disciplines guide decisions about the proper level of automation and enforcement of corporate policy across cloud platforms:
For many customers, governing cost is a major concern when adopting cloud technologies. Balancing performance demands, adoption pacing, and cloud services costs can be challenging. This is especially relevant during major business transformations that implement cloud technologies.
Security is a component of any IT deployment, and the cloud introduces unique security concerns. Many businesses are subject to regulatory requirements that make protecting sensitive data a major organizational priority when considering a cloud transformation. Identifying potential security threats to your cloud environment and establishing processes and procedures for addressing these threats should be a priority for any IT security or cybersecurity team. The Security Baseline discipline ensures technical requirements and security constraints are consistently applied to cloud environments, as those requirements mature.
Identity is increasingly considered the primary security perimeter in the cloud, which is a shift from the traditional focus on network security. Identity services provide the core mechanisms supporting access control and organization within IT environments, and the Identity Baseline discipline complements the Security Baseline discipline by consistently applying authentication and authorization requirements across cloud adoption efforts.
This discipline focuses on ways of establishing policies related to the operational management of an environment, application, or workload. IT Operations teams often provide monitoring of applications, workload, and asset performance. They also commonly execute the tasks required to meet scale demands, remediate performance Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations, and proactively avoid performance SLA violations through automated remediation. Within the Five Disciplines of Cloud Governance, Resource Consistency is a discipline that ensures resources are consistently configured in such a way that they can be discoverable by IT operations, are included in recovery solutions, and can be onboarded into repeatable operations processes.
This discipline focuses on ways of establishing policies to govern asset configuration or deployment. Within the Five Disciplines of Cloud Governance, Deployment Acceleration includes deployment, configuration alignment, and script reusability. This could be through manual activities or fully automated DevOps activities. In either case, the policies would remain largely the same. As this discipline matures, the cloud governance team can serve as a partner in DevOps and deployment strategies by accelerating deployments and removing barriers to cloud adoption, through the application of reusable assets.