Whether you’re attempting to move to the cloud, or you’re already in cloud, chances are you’ve a fair idea about the term ‘cloud governance’. So, what is cloud governance all about and why does it matter?
Cloud Governance refers to the decision-making processes, criteria and policies involved in the planning, architecture, acquisition, deployment, operation and management of the Cloud computing capabilities. To put it simply, Cloud Governance is the people, process, and technology associated with your Cloud Infra, Security, & operations.
Earlier in our blogs we have explained the real meaning of cloud Governance and its importance. Check out our blog Here
In other terms, Cloud governance is a control body against your workloads in the cloud, it manages access, budget, and compliance. At a first impression, this definition looks like a traditional IT governance implemented in the cloud. During the early phase of cloud adoption some of the organizations attempt to apply traditional IT governance methods to the cloud.
But traditional IT governance, starts with User request, then manger approval, then an IT review is performed after that it gets approved and finally moved to provision. But following the same IT governance for the rapidly growing nature of the cloud is pretty much adverse to the cloud model
However, one should not fall in the trap of confusing Cloud Governance to be the same as Cloud Management. Cloud Governance involves a framework with a set of policies and standard practices. This could include policies for cost optimization, resiliency, security, or compliance.
It is difficult to attain the agility, speed, and cost savings benefits of the cloud, without reconsidering your cloud governance process. It is believed that automation is key to re-inventing the cloud governance process. The outcome is streamlined access for users and rules that will take care of establishing, verifying, and enforcing budget and policy compliance.
Here are five reasons why cloud governance is so critical today:
1. Managing Cloud Resources is Easier with Cloud Governance
Today, most of the leading cloud service providers are recommending their customers to shift multiple-tenant workloads i in a single cloud account or subscription into their own separate account. In order to manage distinct cloud workloads, making use of multiple accounts is considered to be the best possible way to deliver accurate access control and cost management, and restrict the security and financial impact in the event of an issue. A good operative cloud governance strategy can provide visibility around key cloud activities and trends and can help organize the volume of accounts most organizations need.
2. Cloud Governance Helps Restrain Shadow IT
Risk of organization data and increased spend are the results of not knowing where your corporate data resides and when you don’t know what systems are being used. Here is where the concept of shadow IT comes in, your own employees will be the gateway for it, because when the access to resources to do their job is getting delayed or they are blocked, they tend to turn to shadow IT to get there job done. In this context the role of cloud governance is to assort all the required framework within the compliance and budget constraints and made easily available for the employees, so that they can access all cloud resources which they are allowed to. By providing personal cloud accounts to the staff members, it increase the convenience and likelihood towards the cloud adoption and encourages management to move more workloads to the cloud.
3. Cloud Governance Reduces Risk
Regardless of the industry vertical, each and every organization has to conduct regular audits and compliance assessments. A cloud governance schema can help you to easily demonstrate and prepare for many of the compliances that fall under information security frameworks and regulations, such as HIPAA, PCI compliance, or SOC 2 requirement. Having a cloud governance program in line with your organizations compliance requirements will allow you to build compliance review and standards in each and every processes and architecture. As cloud governance provide archive of the entire system history, it is very easy for you to document the compliance.
4. Cloud Governance Reduces Labor
Are you still using spreadsheets and similar manual processes to keep track of compliance, cost and accounts? Instead, you can fix a crash barrier at the right point in your organizational hierarchy and have these crash barriers control access, budget, and policy for the stated projects. A complete cloud governance solution also delivers enforcement actions, letting you to do away with essential follow-up actions after you get an alert. Avoiding non-compliant activities and budget overruns saves time and effort. By saving the labour on these activities will allow your resources to have more focus on the value-add, mission-delivering activities.
5. Cloud Governance Reduces Security Risks
Once your organization has decided to move to the cloud, then you will need to develop new security measures to protect your workloads on cloud. When compared to On-Premise, storing data in cloud and running application through cloud is much more convenient, it also increases the risk for unauthorized attempts to access data and data breaches. A good cloud governance plan will help you to identify vulnerabilities in the system, develop plan to avoid risks and to create metrics to measure the effectiveness of the security measures taken. This Governance plan will help security team to have a clear visibility on the entire cloud resources and its Users, this will help them plan security measures accordingly.
Locuz Cloud Governance Solution:
We at Locuz help you develop a cloud governance model that enables you to improve operational integrity, reliability, performance, and transparency using the cloud. We bake in Cloud Security Architecture Design & Review in your Cloud Governance strategy in a way that is integrated with existing Enterprise IT governance processes, policies, boards, & tools.
Highlights of our solution:
- CLOUD ASSURANCE: Cloud Service Operation, Configuration Management, Availability and Access Management.
- CLOUD GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE: Business Strategy and Objectives, Risk Management and Security programs, Cloud Governing Board and Operations team.
- CLOUD SERVICE CATALOGUE: Service Governance, Process and Service Automation, Service Rollout.
- CLOUD INFORMATION SECURITY FRAMEWORK: Security Architecture, Risk Management and Control, Legal and Compliance.
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