What Is Cloud Governance?

Cloud governance is the process of defining and implementing policies that guide an organization's cloud operations. Cloud technologies have fundamentally changed an organization's IT infrastructure, allowing every team to create and use resources that they need without requiring IT administration overheads. However, organizations must enforce resource allocation and access control rules for increased efficiency and security. Cloud governance processes and technologies allow organizations to improve oversight and control over vital areas—such as risk management, data security, data management, cost management, legal procedures, and much more—to ensure cloud operations are aligned with business goals. Organizations can experience the agility and transformation the cloud brings while ensuring they meet all required regulatory and financial considerations.

The cloud governance framework is the set of policies organizations implement to optimize efficiency, improve resilience, and manage the risks of cloud workloads. The framework combines cloud principles that align security, business, and user needs. Setting up a cloud governance framework allows organizations to better control resources, expenses, data security, scalability, and more.

While IT and security teams are vital to setting up and enforcing the framework, they also consult key stakeholders in various departments. Business and IT collaborate to design comprehensive policies that support sustainable cloud operations and implement cloud strategies effectively. Most cloud governance policies consist of the following:

• Identity and access management guidelines.
• Compliance requirements, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GPDR.
• Cloud assets inventories.
• Data security, recovery, and management policies.
• Cloud operational budgets.

Effective cloud governance initiatives influence an organization's ability to maximize cloud usage while managing security risks.

Optimize cloud resource usage

Cloud governance allows organizations to maximize cloud usage and reduce cloud costs. It provides oversight of cloud resource usage across the organization to provide resources to respective business teams and support their objectives without waste. Organizations create individual enterprise accounts to better regulate cloud access and resource allocation amongst departments.

Improve cloud performance

A good cloud governance program includes policies that support the interoperability of applications, services, and data hosted on multiple cloud environments. Without a robust cloud governance framework, these workloads may not meet operational requirements, resulting in a subpar user experience. Cloud governance allows all on-prem and cloud workloads to work seamlessly by removing performance bottlenecks.

Minimize security risks

Cloud governance helps organizations ensure business continuity and prepare for unforeseen disruptive events. For example, a security mitigation policy provides fault-recovery measures to manage security risks from unauthorized access. Cloud governance frameworks make organizations more resilient when deploying and scaling cloud systems.

Organizations operating in specific industries must comply with regulations to protect users' interests. Implementing cloud governance frameworks allows IT, legal, and compliance teams to meet stringent data protection requirements with security measures like data encryption, authentication, and access management.

Reduce administrative overhead

Shadow IT is a practice where employees use software that the IT department does not approve. This results in cloud sprawl, where workloads and data are scattered across the network. Resorting to shadow IT may also risk data incidences.

Implementing cloud governance curbs shadow IT by allowing employees to request and access services they need from a managed cloud infrastructure. You can use automation to replace manual processes that are error-prone and time-consuming. By adopting cloud governance, organizations streamline procedures for all departments to regulate cloud computing, budget allocation, risk management, and other factors.

Organizations have different cloud computing requirements, but a robust cloud governance framework shares overlapping principles.

Financial management

Financial management allows organizations to adopt a profitable and sustainable cloud strategy by comparing the viability of partnering with different cloud service providers. It helps IT and business teams choose a cloud model that best serves their organizational needs. Organizations monitor and optimize cloud spending. For example, system administrators use cloud cost reporting tools to analyze cloud expenses. Then, they scale cloud computing resources accordingly to minimize costs while ensuring optimal service delivery.

Security management

Security management allows organizations to strengthen their security posture across multiple cloud environments. Based on established policies, security teams apply data encryption, threat detection, identity management, and other measures to safeguard applications, data, and networks from unauthorized access. Similarly, compliance teams use cloud tools to track data movement, implement security controls, audit reports, and receive alerts on compliance issues that require immediate attention. Cloud governance ensures organizations operate within the guidelines, standards, laws, and procedures enforced by regulatory bodies.

Resource management

Resource management focuses on configuring cloud resources and managing them efficiently to maximize returns for investments that organizations committed. Administrators discover idle resources and put them to good use or remove them from their cloud strategy. They apply standard policies for all cloud users to streamline collaboration and enhance access efficiency. They also use cloud technologies to efficiently reshape workflows and manage the data lifecycle in rapidly evolving cloud environments.

Performance management

Performance management focuses on continuously improving applications and services on the cloud. IT teams use appropriate tools to configure, deploy, monitor, and scale cloud workloads to ensure they meet growing traffic demands. They use cloud tools like load balancers, content distribution networks (CDN), and configuration management tools to track and optimize cloud systems performance in real-time.

Automation allows organizations to scale cloud governance efforts beyond manual processes. Effective cloud governance requires coordinated implementation of resource provisioning, risk mitigation, security controls, compliance checks, and more. Performing these tasks manually might result in discrepancies that impact cloud performance, costs, compliance, and security. Therefore, IT and security teams use automation tools to streamline and unify cloud governance implementation. Organizations can scale their cloud workloads without relying solely on human supervision or being affected by inconsistent outcomes. For example, software teams use AWS Config to automatically assess and audit their cloud resources to meet compliance checks.

Cloud management is a practical implementation that IT teams take to access, manage, and maintain cloud workloads daily. It involves operational tasks, such as deploying cloud workload, moving data between cloud environments, provisioning resources, remediating cloud security issues, and more. Cloud management is essential to ensure cloud accessibility, reliability, and functionality to all enterprise users and their customers.

Meanwhile, cloud governance focuses on setting the strategy and policies organizations should adopt at a higher level. Cloud governance helps organizations optimize costs, strengthen security, and automate cloud management processes. Rather than being mutually exclusive, both cloud governance and cloud management work together to align an organization's business objectives to its cloud strategy.

Cloud governance enables business continuity, operational expansion, financial growth, and customer confidence. Yet, several challenges remain in implementing the initiatives.

Worries about vendor lock-in might cause some businesses to hesitate when considering cloud adoption. Choose cloud providers that align with your service license agreement requirements and allow you to integrate with third-party tools. Data residency and compliance requirements might limit cloud options that organizations can choose from. You can resolve the challenge by partnering with cloud providers allowing secure integration of public, private, and hybrid networks.

Overseeing resources across multi-cloud environments requires skilled cloud engineers. Organizations can overcome the knowledge gap by training their IT teams with modern cloud operation models, best practices, tools, and frameworks that cloud providers offer. A lack of understanding about cloud security complicates efforts to create a robust cloud governance framework. Understand the shared responsibility model and work with service providers that help organizations operate securely on the cloud.

AWS Cloud Operations allows organizations to manage their workloads on the cloud securely, efficiently, and affordably. You can govern applications on the cloud, on-premise, and at the edge. AWS Cloud Operations is designed to simplify operational complexity, letting you accelerate and manage innovations anywhere and at scale. For example, you can:

• Migrate business workloads easily into multi-account environments.
• Automate your workloads with AWS-supported tools to optimize workflow efficiency.
• Support cloud remediation efforts with insights derived from auditable logs, matrices, and traces.

Get started with cloud governance on AWS by signing up for a free account today.