Cloud Governance: Ensuring Control, Compliance & Security
Cloud Governance: Ensuring Control, Compliance & Security
Blog Article
In our increasingly cloud-centric world, businesses are moving quickly to embrace cloud services to drive innovation and enable scalability. Without governance, however, adoption can lead to greater risks and costs, as well as compliance and licensing issues. This is the key impact of cloud governance. Let’s take a quick look at how cloud governance supports visibility, compliance, and security.
Establishes Clear Policies and Responsibilities
Cloud governance starts with defining a body of rules about how cloud resources can and should be used. For example, it defines the roles, responsibilities and access rights of users. Vulnerabilities are less likely when users understand their constraints regarding access and are held accountable.
Keeps Cloud Costs Under Control
Unpoliced cloud resource usage can compromise adherence to budgets. Governance policies generally have a cost-control aspect. In addition to developing cloud-cost monitoring and management strategies, such as defining appropriate usage allocations and identifying abandoned or unused resources, policies may incorporate automated tools, such as cost-controls and reporting tools. Once in place, organizations will learn from governance and will have better financial decisions to make.
Ensures Compliance
From GDPR to HIPAA to a multitude of other regulations impacting businesses today, organizations must ensure compliance with all applicable regulations. Cloud governance frameworks create a strong link to enforceable compliance with regulations through improved implementation of data protection rules, maintaining an audit trail, and ensuring data storage meets legal standards.
Improves Data Security and Privacy
Proper governance model ensures proper protection of sensitive data using encryption, identity access management, regular security audits and threat detections etc. It minimizes chances of data breaches and improves stakeholder privacy and trust.
Provides Consistency Across Cloud Environments
Cloud Governance provides consistency across multiple clouds or hybrid environments. Companies will have consistent standards and uniform controls in place for how services are provisioned, managed, and monitored. With consistent definitions and deployment models, configuration errors will be mitigated.
Enables Faster Response
With clear policies and notifications in place, teams should be able to detect and respond to incidents as they arise in a more timely manner. Cloud Governance proactively assures how teams should respond to incidents as opposed to a reactive approach.
Encourages Innovation without Limits
Good governance does not limit creativity, it creates opportunities for safe Innovation. Governance creates guardrails as opposed to a backlog. As teams consider searching for new tools and/or services, governance will create policies to monitor their scope within the provided cloud computing policies.
Improves Visibility and Accountability
Centralized governance, monitoring and reporting will allow the business to visibility into tracking performance, usage, compliance, and curb reporting across departments. Increased visibility increases accountability and insight to assist with strategy.
Conclusion
Cloud governance was originally assumed to be all about policy and enforcement. However, it is truly about enabling organizations to properly use the cloud technology in a responsible way. When done effectively companies will end up with a more secure, compliant, and cost-efficient cloud environment that is in support of sustainable growth.