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From the Editors: Strong governance and the cloud


By SD Times Editorial Board
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March 15, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
As enterprises consider baking cloud projects—either pilots or deployments—an essential ingredient is “governance.” Consider all the aspects of risk management that are essential for governance. Those encompass everything from service level agreements to backup plans, from version control to security, from data migration to SOA integration.

What level is the right level of governance for the cloud? What’s the right definition of cloud governance? We believe that the best definition should be the one you already have. In other words, you should apply the same levels of governance to your cloud projects as you would to the same project if it were hosted within your own data centers.

Do not compromise your principles in order to jump onto the cloud bandwagon unless you truly are experimenting. Don’t water down your governance principles and corporate directives to meet what the cloud provider offers.

Expect cloud service providers to describe their security policies, and make sure that you’re comfortable with them. Look for service level guarantees with real teeth, not just a “we’ll refund a prorated amount of your service fees” clause.

Not only that, but do true due diligence evaluations on cloud hosts, just as you would with any other IT service provider. Remember, you’re not buying software, you’re buying services. Check references. Talk to other customers. Get to know someone at the service provider beyond the sales representative (or the sign-up Web form). Find out where the data centers are. Ensure that they have enough capacity and redundancy to deliver on their promises.

And don’t settle for less than what you’d expect from any other service provider. Just because they’re a huge industry name doesn’t mean that they’re the right service provider for your business.

At the end of the day, the reasons for going with a cloud deployment are that it’s a good financial deal for your company, or because the cloud offers you capabilities that you can’t easily build yourself. Without governance, you, and the cloud providers, can’t deliver on those benefits.


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, Microsoft, security

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Comments


03/16/2009 10:45:37 AM EST

Hi Alan, Absolutely agree with you on both points, that Cloud computing brings with it a need for strong governance and the need for providers to work together and openly to achieve this result. This is why Software AG has published the SOALink Cookbook: a set of pragmatic interconnects between governance solution providers seeking to establish governance interoperability. http://www.infoq.com/zones/centrasite/download/SOALink The Cloud provides some pretty exciting opportunities in computing and networking--I'm especially excited by the vision of Unified Computing that Padmasree Warrior touts for CISCO http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/video_cto_response_to_questions_on_unified_computing/ Being able to govern and successfully compose applications across cloud and on-premise infrastructures will require new governance capabilities that will inherently be heterogeneous. So I'm very pleased to see you highlighting this issue and glad to be openly working on cross-vendor solutions. My 2 cents, Miko

United StatesMiko Matsumura


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