The cloud has proved to be a huge game changer for businesses in every domain. This has entirely been possible within such a short span of time not only because of what cloud has to offer but also due to enterprises having embraced cloud management and cloud governance techniques fittingly. With collaboration among team members around the globe or keeping business applications up to date becoming more need-based and on-demand, businesses are able to share critical data and deploy applications at any point in time due to clearly defined cloud strategies.
Even through the COVID 19 pandemic, most large enterprises relied on the cloud to keep them going. Just a few months into the pandemic, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that the company had experienced two years of digital transformation in two months as its customers began to adopt cloud solutions at such a fast pace.
Cloud adoption, however, brings with it, its own set of security issues that can’t be entirely avoided. For both security and efficiency reasons, it’s important that your organization has both cloud governance and cloud management intact. What is the difference between the two? And how can enterprises make sure they are using them effectively? By virtue of this blog, let us look at how cloud infrastructure, operations, applications, and security can be managed more efficiently, through well-defined cloud management and cloud governance strategies.
What is Cloud Governance?
For a successful multi-cloud setup, it is essential for enterprises to define how their cloud infrastructure and applications can be controlled, operated, optimized and protected. Cloud governance refers to the rules, policies, and systems that an enterprise adopts to directly control and monitor the cloud while intensifying businesses with minimal risks. Governance enables continuous monitoring and auditing, defining and setting up necessary protocols, policies and guidelines that can administer and control cloud operational resources and workloads. It also enables authorized access and modification to data to evade operational and financial losses.
Some governance rules may include:
- Defining roles and responsibilities
- Complying with industry norms and standards
- Setting policies for disaster recovery
- Ensuring escalation processes
- Implementing network policies
What is Cloud Management?
Establishing rules and policies is important but effectively implementing them into practice is even more necessary. This is where cloud management comes in, taking into account the process of monitoring and overseeing all cloud services deployed in private, public or hybrid cloud environments. The right cloud management tools help keep cloud resources aligned to the defined governance measures enabling enterprises to comply with all the established rules and regulations. It also helps them manage resources across multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments, ensuring that the company’s strategic and operational goals are met. With cloud management techniques, enterprises can structure and control all the involved applications and infrastructure on the cloud gaining end-to-end visibility into compliance, risks and optimization opportunities.
Cloud management responsibilities include:
- Organize and manage corporate resources
- Maintain data security
- Ensure compliance is met with
Cloud governance and management complement each other and can be considered cross-functional responsibilities of any enterprise aiming to mature on cloud. They are seldom the responsibility of a single employee or a particular team and having adequate cloud governance and management controls in place offering multiple benefits such as:
Reduced operational costs
While public cloud is frequently considered more cost-effective than hybrid or on-premise, you are unlikely to save money without sufficient management and oversight.
Workflows become more automated as a result of adhering to cloud governance standards. This enables you to automate the management and labor-intensive manual processing, eventually lowering the required manpower and resulting in decreased costs.
Improved security
Implementing adequate cloud management and governance standards is one of the greatest strategies to assure robust cloud security. Cloud governance guarantees that your cloud is secure and compliant with industry regulations. Cloud management, on the other hand, allows you to keep track of all of your workloads and perform regular security checks. If audits and checks are set up appropriately, alerts will get triggered in case of a vulnerability being detected ensuring all issues are discovered and resolved as soon as they arise.
Better control and visibility
When it comes to the cloud environment, whether private, public, or hybrid, visibility and control are crucial. If there are no right policies defined, there is a high possibility of losing the overall control and visibility after moving to the public cloud.
With comprehensive cloud governance and management, cloud resources can be monitored and controlled completely. Real-time monitoring and analysis further help in understanding the usage of IT resources and optimizing performance, operations and costs.
Conclusion
For cloud governance and management to flourish and enable the effective running of your business, it is best to get started with the below strategies and innovative practices:
- Design: To evaluate your current capabilities and understand what can be leveraged for maximized outcomes while ensuring cost-effectiveness. This would typically include designing milestones, goals, SLAs, projects, metrics and risk mitigation measures to name a few.
- Implement: Instrument the plan and design to actual action to move towards well-defined cloud management and governance setup.
- Continuous improvement: To ensure continuous assessments take place for better efficiency and cost management.
Cloud governance tools will help you understand and provide solutions that meet the ever-changing needs of the industry. Before creating a roadmap for building a cloud framework, our team of experts is invested in understanding and ensuring that the policies are set, and the tools made available for a more stable and secure cloud environment. Get in touch if you are looking for governance, management, compliance and well-architected audits on the cloud.