Governance is about providing clear direction, monitoring performance, allocating resources and meeting business objectives, sans parameter breaches of risk tolerance and compliance obligations.
Yet Cloud Governance isn’t mature enough in the market place. Organizations are grappling with implementing and seeding best practices effectively in their global operations.Instituting a Cloud Governance isn’t a trivial job and is not just about Cloud cost management alone, but is also about extending the ITIL framework.
Cloud has additional dimensions to be considered for management:
- Evolving technology and rapid pace of cloud innovation
- “As a Service” nature – delivering to demand and speed
- From silos to Integrated, global yet conjoined data centers
Hence Companies have to draft/redraft policies and set best practices to enable people to manage the dynamic and flexible nature of Cloud infrastructure, Cloud services and Cloud hosted applications – while ensuring the organization goals of cost optimization, security, agility and compliance are met.
Organizations have adopted Governance models that incorporate Finance Management, Operations, Service Provider Management, Portfolio Management, Architecture, etc. In addition,organizations need to include 3 key aspects in adopting Cloud by instituting a Cloud Governance framework that has:
1. Cloud Assets and Resource Management
2. Cloud Strategy and Capability
3. Cloud Service Delivery
- Provisions, Manages, Monitors and Assesses the organization’s Cloud landscape; this permits organizations to recognize Cloud silos, redundancies in services and shadow IT.
- Designs and enhances Cloud solutions, by focusing on how the organization should govern them (solutions), so as to keep risks to the barest minimum and maximize the actual potential of Cloud services.
- Design services, catalogues/ portfolio,
- Manage service agility and self-service
- Designs roles and responsibilities and operating model of the Cloud IT organization
- Define policies, practices and standards
- Cloud workflows
- Service SLAs
- Risk management
- Metrics and reporting in place.
To stay abreast of the digital evolution, IT is seen to be more pronounced in shifting from its conventional role as an operator of systems, to strategic advisor, to business solution orchestrator.
The Cloud’s increasing ubiquity, combined with a facile procurement and deployment by just about anybody in the business, projects the reality of the role of IT which is more than significant for it.
One bold step that the organizations should take to firmly anchor this partnership, is to have a strongCloud Governance framework in place, that everyone must abide to.And what would the resultant effect be? A rich “Cloud-first” environment that eases into the architecture of the organization, leverages cost efficiencies and considerably lowers risk.