Taking steps to clarify cloud governance
February 20, 2009 —
(Page 1 of 3)
The concept of “governance” means different things to different people—and in fact, even the word itself is open to debate. However, no matter how you slice it, the consensus is that governance will play a crucial role in the ascension of cloud computing, and that cloud computing can complement governance existing processes.
Cloud services are standardized offerings that are delivered through a common service catalogue. The services are rapidly provisioned and delivered out of a highly elastic and scalable infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go model, said Ric Telford, vice president of cloud services at IBM.
Just as with traditional back office applications, compliance is key. "Anything that an organization could engage in that would need to be monitored by senior management at least on an occasional basis to make sure that the company is behaving properly in the modern world" should be governed, said Denis Pombriant, managing principal analyst of Beagle Research Group.
In cloud computing, providers should be transparent about the services that they offer, with clearly stated service-level agreements, he said. At the same time, enterprises need to assume responsibility to ensure that mission critical business processes are safely supported by on-demand technology to minimize the loss of service and data loss, he added.
"Governance in the cloud means the same as governance in SOA, except service level is 1,000 times more important," said Ross Mason, CTO and founder of MuleSource. Developers that consume third-party services through interfaces across the Web need to know about SLAs, he added. "One of the piece of [cloud] governance is to provide that crucial information."
"Cloud computing begets good IT governance; a focus on IT governance leads you to the cloud," said Telford. It you are building a cloud, it will have the attributes of good governance, such as financial visibility into the cost of services and the ability to more accurately deliver on SLAs by taking control over how resources are provisioned, he explained.
"As IT organizations seek to adopt the benefits of cloud computing, it's important that they do it in a way that aligns with their own IT governance strategies," said Ariel Kelman, Salesforce.com’s senior director of platform product marketing. Cloud adoption, he said, should be done in a way that does not disrupt but reinforces governance processes.
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