Cloud Governance: Moving Into The Cloud

A lot of planning goes into a proper transition of a company’s resources to cloud computing, and it is a necessary burden that IT managers must take. And an essential part of that planning involves taking care of the system after it has made the transition, which some organizations are still fumbling with or are learning on the fly. Both should not really be treated as options.

The first thing one has to remember about cloud governance is that it should never be static; it should evolve with the environment, the market, especially with the changes in your business needs. Governance is all about taking the necessary steps and actions to ensure that your organization uses its resources and systems optimally in order to achieve its goals. But rarely do you see governance as a core matter; it usually is bumped to the lower priorities.

The best way for cloud transition is to put governance of the system and resources as a priority, and you will find that everything will fit into place. Most organizations will plan for the fastest and cheapest transition not knowing it hurts them in the long run because they are unable to make use of the systems optimally. The key here is to think ahead, align your business requirements with the cloud in mind. You have to understand that not every business process or workload can be converted to the cloud while others need to be transitioned over time to ensure that there is proper compliance to the actual requirement and prevent a lot of other data integrity and sovereignty issues.

With that in mind, make sure to look at all your tools and systems and figure which ones would really benefit you by moving them to the cloud and which ones will not make much difference, you could probably save more money and resources leaving them where they are. And most of all, focus to move your most mature solutions first in order to make sure that they perform optimally before looking at other solutions you could move as well.

Here are some governance-related questions you can ask yourself when planning for a move to the cloud:

• Will there be changes to your existing reporting and metrics or will they need to be reevaluated and refurbished? Will the same metrics actually apply to the new cloud components? Are you able to maintain visibility of your information architecture and metadata in SharePoint across the cloud platform as a whole or with individual services and sites?
• Are you able to track storage use and data access and to what degree? How much visibility will you have in terms of content database reports, your entire user base, as well as storage?
• How will your compliance monitoring and auditing capability be affected? Will you still be aware of all accesses in regards to what, where, and whom?
• How much visibility and control do you have with the interactions between your users? Is content and resources being used and shared properly, and is collaboration really achieved?
• Will you be able to setup management procedures and policies across all systems? Will you be able to automate repetitive, responsive, and preventive tasks?

By Abdul Salam