Controlling cloud consumption through governance
Before acquiring any cloud assets, organizations should develop a governance model to control cloud consumption and growth. By definition, cloud governance encompasses the people, processes, and technologies needed to support your cloud infrastructure, security, and overall operations. Cloud governance is best tackled from the outset, since an organization’s portfolio becomes increasingly complex as it expands. Organizations must juggle best practices and licensing requirements from multiple marketplaces and providers, which can be daunting.
If you’re not sure where to start with cloud governance, don’t delay. Instead, think of your cloud services as a more traditional business asset – such as a newly purchased fleet of laptops. If your business purchased new laptops, IT would not be comfortable giving them to employees until the laptops were inventoried, assigned asset tags, and assigned to the users and cost centers who will use them. Then, your organization would make a plan to manage the laptops throughout their lifespan.
Cloud services are similar. Think about cloud consumption as another asset to your organization – before you let any users use the cloud service, define a process to tag resources that are deployed in the cloud. Then, by allocating tagged resources to cost centers, you will gain granular insights into cloud consumption trends and spend for business units, departments and projects.. With these insights, organizations can anticipate costs before they occur, forecast budget anomalies and evaluate ROI while your cloud services are in active use.