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Guide to Cloud Governance

Guide to Cloud Government: What is it and how to implement it?

GUIDE TO CLOUD GOVERNANCE: WHAT IS IT AND HOW TO IMPLEMENT IT?

Having loads in the cloud transforms the organization exponentially and exerts a change in every way: from the way in which the operation of applications and infrastructure is worked, to the vision and business thinking.

Being an operationally disruptive company also comes different responsibilities, strategies and decisions that in turn are accompanied by problems such as:

The more cloud infrastructure you have, the more budget chaos arises.
Users are beginning to be given access, losing visibility of what they use and operate.
Resources are deployed that are not known to be adequately secure.
Resources are raised and abandoned, or oversized resources are generated.
Monitoring and control becomes complex because visibility is lost.
Manual control of the cloud is chosen, which causes human errors in operation.

With all this, the credibility of the benefit of the cloud is lost and innovation can come to a halt. Precisely from there arises the implementation of a Cloud Government.

What is Cloud Government?

It is the set of guidelines, processes, rules, and tools to operate the cloud efficiently. A set whose approach manages to align the business with its objectives and return on investment. In that sense, Cloud Government is not the definition of standards, Cloud Government is ensuring compliance over time.

How to start doing Cloud Government?

Firstly, each company has different operational, security, process, budget, and metric particularities. Therefore, as a first element, these singularities must be clear so that, based on them, the 4 pillars of management can be built.

Operational Management

Define corporate policies on cloud usage: which systems, applications, and databases should be in the cloud.
Define key personnel for the administration and use of the cloud.
Define architecture guidelines for each of the workloads that will live according to the Well-Architected Framework.
Management of the performance of what is in the cloud: define metric controls, monitoring and observability based on the previous points.

Consumption Management

Define an estimated budget for each of the loads, even determine it by area.
Define how the budget will be traced.
Define how to visualize the return on investment of the cloud by workload, determine it by area.
Define a cost optimization approach.
Define the unique personnel who have access to raise resources.

Configuration Management

Know and understand each of the resources you have in the cloud: services, machines, databases, operating system, connectivity.
Define if required per workload in high availability.
Define the process for the deployment of services.
Define guidelines for the configuration of the services and their objective.

Security Management

Define specific security policies, both for the cloud environment and for the workloads at the enterprise level, since each load will also have its own needs.
Define user policies: access, password rotation, authentication.
Define security compliance traceability measures.
Define traceability tools for security compliance.
Define tools required for security deployment at the console level and at the workload level.
Define personnel for compliance monitoring.
Understand the operational risks of security incidents.

How to implement Cloud Government?

Once we have defined all the management pillars, you can now start implementing Cloud Governance in the company through tools, documentation and preparation of suitable personnel for it.

It is necessary to make a plan of how it will operate by time and by each of the management pillars. In this way, it is possible to define tasks and technological requirements to carry it out.

You must document and make a plan to implement it in the cloud console or consoles you have, measure efforts, resources and services. It is not necessary to implement it quickly, on the contrary, it must be done in waves, defining:

Criticality
Impact on applications
Business Changes

Normally, companies determine a Cloud Government team that will be in charge of achieving its execution on an ongoing basis, so it will also have to be trained.

This team cannot operate alone, the success of Cloud Government consists of having tools that allow the automation of its execution on AWS. For example, there is:

Control Tower.

AWS Organizations

AWS Audit Manager.

AWS Service Catalog

In addition to the services of the cloud itself, it is necessary to include agility tools such as Atlassian which, with Opsgenie, allows integration with the cloud, giving visibility in dashboards on compliance with the Cloud Governance framework, which allows designated personnel to quickly have visibility of their tasks, receive notifications of non-compliance, as well as the assignment of tasks that are carried out on a recurring basis.

It integrates with the cloud’s own services and, through automation, performance verification is carried out, achieving a definition at the enterprise level with great success.

Benefits of Cloud Government:

Budget control
Controlled growth
Resource Visibility
Operational Excellence
Workload and information security
Agility when enabling new services
Greater visibility into cloud ROI

See you in the Cloud!

Itera is a cloud-centric company with a long history of deploying and migrating workloads in clouds such as AWS. As an Atlassian Platinum Enterprise Partner, we have certified specialists, whose focus is on the adoption of collaborative management in Jira, on the architecture of cloud services and on best practices for the adoption of a Cloud Governance model.