What is Cloud Governance?

The set of rules or guidelines that serve as a guide for the adoption, use, and administration of cloud technology services is known as cloud governance.

It is a continuous procedure designed to monitor and adjust as needed to save expenses, boost productivity, and remove security threats. It must be implemented on top of current governance models.

Cloud governance includes observability that offers application performance monitoring (APM), alerts and optimized incident response and log management, and more across workloads. It also integrates FinOps solutions that is helpful financially, tracking cloud expenditures, budgeting, forecasting, right sizing etc., to exercise control over multi-cloud environments.  

The Necessity of Cloud Governance

If cloud governance is put into practice, businesses can steer clear of the following problems.

1. Challenges to Privacy and Security

Unofficial software downloads and installations, unlawful data storage, and user access to prohibited websites can all lead to this problem. Several aspects of cloud security are covered by cloud governance solutions. For instance, access restrictions, audit trails, security groups, encryption, and application.

2. Cloud Sprawl

This occurs when staff members from several departments utilize third-party cloud infrastructure and products without obtaining the required authorizations. Crowd sprawl can result in redundant, ineffective, and uncontrolled cloud apps remaining on the company cloud and lead to issues if it is not identified and controlled.

3. Vendor Lock-In

This challenge forces businesses to rely on the cloud service provider for services, which is why many suppliers choose it. By appropriately altering the SLA and reducing reliance on a single vendor, this can be prevented, and the organization can maintain its independence.  

A few other issues include shadow IT (overuse of cloud resources) and the absence of interoperability and data portability that cloud governance can solve.