Cloud Governance: What It Is and Why You Need It

Cloud cost management vs. cloud governance

Every company exerts some level of effort to manage costs, performance, and risk in their hybrid cloud environment. But to ensure that those activities are performed consistently and efficiently across the board, you need a framework of policies, processes, controls, and tracking.

In other words, you need cloud governance.

What is cloud governance?

Let’s start with the definition of corporate governance, which is the collection of mechanisms, processes, and relations used by various parties to control and to operate a corporation. Similarly, cloud governance is the collection of mechanisms, processes, and relations used by various parties to control and to operate a cloud environment. In fact, SearchCloudComputing’s definition of cloud governance notes that “a cloud governance framework is not a new set of concepts or practices, but simply the application of existing governance practices to cloud operations,” which they further detail as “a set of practices that help ensure users operate in the cloud in ways that they want, that the operations are efficient, and that the user can monitor and correct operations as needed.”

So, why do you need cloud governance?

According to Synergy Research Group, average annual spending on cloud services grew 52% over the past decade, compared to only 2% for data centers. Enterprises are pouring enormous sums of money into their cloud infrastructures and that’s not likely to change any time soon. And when you consider that those budgets are supporting key day-to-day operations (keeping the lights on), differentiated offerings and experiences (maintaining a competitive advantage), and strategic transformational initiatives (creating new market opportunities), you want to ensure you’re getting the performance you need at the best possible cost.

You also want to avoid wasting money in the process. You might think that last bit is self-evident, but the reality is that up to one-third of cloud spend is unnecessary. Given the size of the typical cloud spend, one-third can be a significant number. If you could reallocate that amount to other initiatives that are currently under-resourced—after all, isn’t everyone having to do more with less?—you’d get so much more value from those funds. But as long as you keep paying cloud bills that include excessive costs, you’re actually doing less with more. Too often, the teams spending the cloud budget aren’t set up to be accountable for and care about controlling cloud costs—and even those that are accountable often don’t have the tools to make it easy.

All of this is why you need cloud governance.

Good cloud governance starts with effective cloud cost management

Cloud cost management may be just one aspect of cloud governance, but it’s a vital component. In fact, you can’t successfully implement a cloud governance framework without it. While there are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there, not all of them will give you the foundation you need for effective cloud governance. There are a few key areas you must have covered. You need:

• Visibility into your entire infrastructure and its impact on the business. This means having a single view across not only all the public clouds you are using, but your private cloud and on-premises environments as well.
• Reporting features that let you dive into details to understand what’s really going on. This requires the ability to set multi-dimensional views that reflect your business structure and requirements.
• Analysis capabilities that support what-if exploration to better understand the implications of various options.
• Recommendations to intelligently streamline the list of potential optimization choices to a manageable set that can deliver the desired results.

When you cover your cloud cost management bases, you create a solid foundation on which to begin establishing effective cloud governance within your enterprise.

Get started on the right path to cloud governance with Virtana Cloud Cost Management

Virtana Cloud Cost Management radically simplifies management of your hybrid cloud IT infrastructure by optimizing cost, capacity, and performance in real time, on an ongoing basis. Virtana CCM delivers deep insight into your cloud spend across multiple cloud providers so you can:

• Understand cloud costs through bill analysis capabilities and cost vs. utilization reports
• Automatically optimize cloud instances with rightsizing recommendations
• Identify unused compute instances, storage on stopped instances, and unattached storage blocks
• Easily track the amortized value of reservation discounts at the instance level and conduct what-if analysis to evaluate potential savings

Try Virtana Cloud Cost Management for free