The journey to the cloud is well underway for most European organizations. According to IDC, 84% already operate hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. But despite the widespread commitment to adopting cloud-based IT infrastructures, many organizations miss a crucial ingredient that will help them truly succeed in getting the most from those new infrastructures: cloud governance.
What is cloud governance and why is it important?
Cloud governance is a set of rules that allows organizations to get control over their IT infrastructures, which are often a complex mix of cloud-based and on-premise architectures. By putting rules and guiding principles in place, we enable IT modernization, cloud migration and business innovation, while addressing critical security and compliance risks.
It is an organizational discipline, not a technology. Cloud governance therefore requires a vision, people and leadership, as much as it does process and policy structures. It is the glue that ties together cloud and other technology strategies, allowing organizations to navigate their way towards cloud-native futures with confidence in what they’re doing.
Cloud governance impacts organizations in four key way:
- Simplified operations. Having one policy that governs your entire IT estate reduces operational complexity while increasing efficiency, observability and cost control.
- Unified data. Governance tools and practices help to keep track of data, regardless of its location.
- Compliance and security. Being able to respond appropriately to rapidly evolving privacy and data security legislation puts your organization on the front foot going forward.
- A single source of truth. Privacy, security and data governance all benefit from having a single source of data truth.
What are the benefits of cloud governance?
A cloud governance model delivers the blueprint for building and operating your cloud environment. It benefits organizations in three main ways.
- Unlock business value. A governance framework ensures cloud usage is aligned with business objectives, allowing businesses to pursue new cloud-based business models and innovations. It leads to better productivity, lower costs, faster digital innovation and smarter insights whilst ensuring business continuity, resiliency and security are preserved.
- Optimize cloud costs and usage. Commercial and technical teams often do not have the right oversight and capability to properly cloud costs. Policy-based cost governance for current and future cloud operations, ensures cloud service usage is predictable, reasonable, and accountable.
- Improve operational efficiency. Architecting for a hybrid cloud is not an easy undertaking. But a cloud governance framework provides the consistent and agile deployment and resource management model to help organizations avoid the operational pitfalls that increase complexity, cost and risk.
Why should you embrace cloud governance?
Cloud governance tools and processes not only simplify the overall cloud journey for organizations, they also help identify and mitigate security and compliance risks. All this while unlocking tangible business value from cloud-based innovation.
IDC has been focusing its research efforts into the benefits of establishing a cloud governance framework. Learn more about cloud governance and keep your business moving forward by downloading the content below.
