As enterprises continue to add new use cases and workloads to their cloud portfolio, the stakes keep rising for potential governance speed bumps. Business users and IT professionals alike are now using the cloud for everything from compliance and security to cloud-native application development and infrastructure optimization. But this makes policy management more difficult, time consuming and costly, especially with so many cloud services being purchased and deployed outside the scope, visibility and control of a centralized IT operations group.
Then, add in the fact that the typical enterprise now is committed to not just a cloud architecture, but increasingly a multicloud environment. This makes governance even trickier―and potentially riskier―as organizations try to sort through governance rules, processes, scalability, costs and responsiveness.
The typical enterprise has to support, maintain and optimize governance for a dizzying range of requirements, from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for running applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to reconfiguring configurations, workload migration, cost-overrun alerts, security event management and expiration timelines for Reserved Instances. Working with a reputable, experienced cloud service provider certainly helps, but it doesn’t change the fact that governance burdens remain the responsibility of the enterprise.
To effectively and efficiently manage governance responsibilities across this vast span of workflows, organizations have to replace their legacy manual governance processes with automated policies that provide visibility, accountability and responsiveness in a fast-changing, dynamic environment.
Forward-thinking, cloud-first organizations increasingly are putting in place cloud management platforms that make cloud governance integral to overall corporate governance practices. Since so many business stakeholders are directly involved in deploying and managing cloud workloads, a highly automated policy management platform is needed to generate actions and alerts in real time, rather than having to wait for manual detection and remediation of issues.
To make this work properly, the cloud management platform needs to drive accountability back to the line-of-business owners who often are contracting, managing and paying for the services that are now so essential to their success. Automated governance policies also proactively identify security and compliance risks, which are a critical focus for business executives and even boards of directors, who ultimately bear the burden of regulatory and legal problems caused by security vulnerabilities.
Of course, better cloud governance delivers important financial benefits as well. In an increasingly multicloud enterprise, having a centralized management solution in place that spans multiple clouds (and multiple cloud service provider platforms) eases governance, speeds reporting and spots capacity utilization problems that can result in higher than anticipated costs.
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Download NowHaving this kind of proactive approach to cloud governance often helps organizations improve customer responsiveness and competitive advantage by saving them hours or even days in identifying governance issues before they become pervasive throughout the organization. In doing so, it alleviates the need to hire more specialists, while also allowing the organization to re-deploy many existing IT team members away from governance management and manual alerts in favor of more strategic tasks closer to the point of business activity.
The CloudHealth cloud management platform eases all aspects of cloud governance, from financial management, multifunction cloud automation and infrastructure optimization to security compliance. With so many organizations still failing to actively monitor their cloud use, despite their growing reliance on cloud platforms for strategic workloads, it is essential that organizations re-engineer their approach to governance in the cloud.
Automation, proactive identification of potential problems, swift alerts and remediation, holistic views of cloud activity and granular financial detail are key elements of the CloudHealth cloud management platform. Modernized cloud governance practices and tools can not only help organizations steer clear of security, compliance and legal snafus, but also help organizations save money and leverage their staff on projects that drive the organization’s long-term competitiveness.
For more information on CloudHealth’s cloud governance solution, please visit www.cloudhealthtech.com.
Trevor Jones
Site Editor
