Cloud Governance

Jun 10, 2010 Posted on Jun 10, 2010 in Cloud Fit, Cloud Platforms, Featured | 0 comments

Governance in the Cloud

Cloud Computing enables a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability for deploying and managing your applications on the cloud. With this flexibility comes a list of items that have to be managed more closely compared to traditional systems. Availability, Security, privacy, location of cloud services and compliance are just some of the aspects of the cloud that have to be monitored and managed closely.

Governance in the Cloud is about defining policies around managing the above factors and tracking/enforcing the policies at run time when the applications are running. Different cloud vendors have varying degrees of flexibility when it comes to giving their clients access to the underlying infrastructure. It becomes imperative for businesses to understand these capabilities and define policies that mirror the needs of the business.

Governance Policy Definitions

During the design and development stage, it is important to establish rules and policies around how the various services in the cloud are going to be monitored and managed. The Quality of Service ( QoS ) of the underlying Cloud infrastructure and the Service Level Agreement ( SLA) levels of both the platform as well as the application have to be monitored and tracked. Additionally, defining access policies to control the roles in the organization who have access to the cloud environment is a key component of defining establishing governance policies. For example, Governance policies should be defined for the following

Role based access to establish control over who has access to deploy and manage cloud assets
Metrics for monitoring the application’s performance and other business critical KPIs
Rules for defining critical levels of the metrics define above
Service Levels ( SLA ) of both the application as well as the underlying infrastructure
Quality of Service Levels

Governance Policy Enforcement
One of the main attractiveness of the cloud is the ability to reduce the “Time to Market” significantly. Cloud gives businesses the ability to roll out changes to applications almost instantaneously compared to tradition models. This capability comes with its own set of issues around versioning, upgrades and compatibilities of services. Well defined and enforced policies are a must to ensure robustness of the cloud based application. Policies can be enforced through the following

Change Management Reports to track and log the changes happening to the cloud assets
Alerts and Notifications to ensure that changes are captured and bubbled up to the decision makers in a timely fashion
Threshold based actions based on pre-defined rules. For example, automatically increasing the footprint ( read # of load balanced Cloud instances ) if the performance of the system is below certain threshold levels