Introduction
Cloud allows businesses to quickly build and scale their applications. With multiple teams using the cloud it can be hard to manage everything that your company is doing. From resources being spun up all over the place to cloud costs skyrocketing. There are many issues that come up when trying to manage your clouds.
Having good cloud governance enables you to decide what cloud services and resources your business will use and manage how those services and resources are used and maintained. This allows developers to still build and use the cloud in their day-to-day jobs while you as a business can maintain proper security and control your costs.
Governance helps you better manage your cloud from security to cost. Ensuring that resources are being used properly and who has access to them and what data they may hold.
We will go over some of our best practices to help improve your cloud governance and take control of your clouds.
What is Cloud Governance?
Cloud governance is a set of rules and processes that dictate how your company uses its cloud resources. It can be applied to any type of cloud public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud. As well as what runs on those clouds.
It will help define how you manage your cloud and enforce rules on how those resources should be used. Whether through how resources should be named, tagged or what security controls they need to meet.
There are many different areas that a cloud governance framework can help you manage.
- Security – Who has access to what resources and what controls should be enforced on those resources.
- Compliance – What rules do we need to follow and how can we prove we are following those rules.
- Cost – What are we spending and who is responsible for that spend.
- Resources – What standards should our resources follow when spinning up and using resources in our clouds.
- Operations – How should we operate our resources in the cloud and what controls do we need to manage and protect them.
- Responsibility – Who is responsible for making sure our controls are being met and what do we do if something isn’t.
By having these rules and processes in place you can better manage your cloud resources. Allowing you to focus on what’s important to your business and reduce the risk of your developers not following the correct procedures.
Why You Need Cloud Governance
As more companies are moving to the cloud it’s important to know why you need to implement a cloud governance framework. Here are some of the reasons you should consider adding cloud governance to your organization.
Security and Compliance
When your company has certain rules and regulations that it has to follow it can become difficult to ensure that your cloud environments meet those standards. By having cloud governance you can make sure that your resources meet the security requirements that your business needs.
Whether it’s making sure your resources are encrypted, only allowing certain regions to spin up resources or monitoring for vulnerabilities. You can enforce these controls through your cloud governance framework and allow your developers to continue building and deploying resources.
This supports meeting your regulatory requirements.
Reduce Your Cloud Spend
One of the biggest benefits of implementing cloud governance is that you can control your cloud spend. By knowing who is responsible for each resource you can keep a closer eye on your cloud bill.
You can make sure that you only have resources that are being used and remove any that may be taking up unnecessary space. Having good cloud cost governance helps you manage your cloud spend and ensure that you are only paying for what you need.
Allow Developers to Work More Efficiently
Developers want to be able to build and deploy resources as fast as possible. Having cloud governance can help them do that by providing them with guidelines on how to do so. If you have proper templates and controls in place developers can spin up resources faster and with less friction.
This allows them to focus on building out their applications instead of worrying about whether they are following the proper procedures.
Cloud Governance Best Practices
There are many things you can do to implement good cloud governance. Here are some of our top recommendations to help you get started.
Align Governance with Business Goals and Risk
Before jumping into creating a cloud governance framework you want to know what you’re trying to accomplish. Do you want to make sure that your resources are more secure? Maybe you want to control your cloud spend. Whatever it is that you want to achieve you should first determine your goals. The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework governance perspective provides additional guidance on connecting cloud adoption, risk management, and business outcomes.
Once you know what you want to accomplish you can start creating policies that helps you reach those goals. You may want to create stricter policies for resources that contain PII data and allow developers to have more freedom when working with development resources.
Establish Clear Ownership and Accountability
Once you have created your cloud governance framework you need to make sure that you have people who helps you enforce those policies. Whether through a dedicated cloud team or individuals that can help manage your resources. Make sure that you know who is responsible for each area and establish accountability. Microsoft provides related guidance on how to build a cloud governance team with clear roles, sponsorship, responsibilities, and accountability.
You may also want to create an executive that can help drive your cloud governance efforts and help you with any conflicts that may arise.
Create Standardized Cloud Policies and Guardrails
After you have created your ownership you can start creating policies for your developers to follow. These can range from requiring all resources to have tags to restricting what regions they can spin up resources in.
Once you have your policies in place you can start creating guardrails to help your developers follow those policies. Whether through using IaC templates or monitoring for resources that don’t meet your policies. You can start automating some of these tasks to help reduce manual work.
Automate Governance Through Policy as Code
As you are creating policies and guardrails you should also start monitoring your resources. You can use these policies to help monitor your resources and see if they are meeting your standards. This can also help you find any resources that may not have been created properly and can help you remediate those issues. See Microsoft guidance on how to enforce cloud governance policies through policy enforcement, automation, tagging, and ongoing reviews.
Once you have all of these things in place you can start managing your cloud more efficiently.
Manage Your Costs
Now that you have your resources under control you can start managing your cloud spend. You can use your tags to help determine what each resource is being used for and who is responsible for that spend.
If you have developers that are spinning up resources that aren’t being used you can notify them and remove those resources. You can also use these policies to make sure that developers aren’t spinning up overly expensive resources that may not be needed. Read about cloud FinOps for more on cloud financial management and cost optimization.
Standardize Resource Provisioning and Lifecycle Management
You should also make sure that you have resiliency in your cloud environments. You may want to make sure that you have backups in place or that your resources are spread across multiple zones or regions. By having these in place you can help ensure that you can recover from any disasters that may occur. The Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework provides additional guidance for secure, reliable, efficient, and cost-effective cloud environments.
Measure Governance Effectiveness and Improve Continuously
Once you have your cloud governance in place you want to make sure that you are monitoring it. See if your policies are working and if you need to make any changes. You may also want to look at your metrics to see if there are any trends that you can use to help improve your cloud.
Some of these metrics could be how many resources are compliant with your policies, how many open findings you have and your cloud spend. You can use these to help drive your cloud governance efforts and see if there are any areas that you need to improve on.
Challenges With Cloud Governance
There are many challenges that can come up when trying to implement cloud governance. Here are some of the most common ones.
- Too Many Policies – If you have too many policies in place your developers may not follow them. They may feel like you are restricting them from doing their job and not allow them to build what they need to.
- Not Enough Visibility – If you don’t know what resources you have in your clouds it can be difficult to enforce policies. Make sure that you have visibility into your resources and who is using them.
- Manually Managing Policies – If you are manually managing your policies it can become difficult to keep up with all of your resources. Try to automate as much as you can to help reduce this burden.
- Not Updating Your Policies – If your business changes your policies should change with it. Make sure that you are updating your policies to meet your business needs.
Steps to Implementing Cloud Governance
There are many steps that you can take to implement cloud governance. Here are some of our top recommendations to help you get started.
- Understand Your Current Environment – Before you jump into creating policies you want to know what you currently have in your clouds. What resources are you using and who has access to them. Once you have this information you can start creating policies that helps you manage your resources.
- Create Policies That Fit Your Business – After you know what you currently have you can start creating policies that helps you manage your resources. Remember that you don’t want to create policies that are too strict or your developers may not follow them.
- Create Guardrails to Help Enforce Your Policies – Once you have your policies in place you can start creating guardrails to help enforce them. Whether through through IaC templates or monitoring you can start automating some of these tasks.
- Monitor Your Resources – Now that you have your policies and guardrails in place you can start monitoring your resources. You can use your policies to help monitor your resources and see if they are meeting your standards.
- Continuously Improve Your cloud governance – After you have your cloud governance in place you want to make sure that you are continuously improving it. By monitoring your metrics and seeing where you can improve you can help ensure that your cloud is running smoothly.
How Hexaware Can Help You With Cloud Governance
As you can see, there are many ways to improve cloud governance. Hexaware can support cloud assessment, migration, and modernization through Amaze® for application cloud transformation.
Read Mastering Cloud Operations: Key Understandings and Smart Approaches for more on operating and managing cloud environments.
No matter what your cloud journey looks like, Hexaware can help you take control of your cloud environments. Read Cloud Continuum: Best Practices and Benefits for additional context on cloud adoption across different environments.
Conclusion
Implementing cloud governance can help your business better manage its cloud resources. By creating policies and guardrails you can help your developers follow those standards and allow you to control your cloud spend.
Remember that you want to create policies that fit your business and not restrict your developers from doing their jobs. By following these best practices you can help ensure that your clouds are secure and that you are only paying for what you need.
