Decision-makers continue to place big bets on the cloud, allocating an increasingly significant percentage of their workloads, digital assets, and budgets into cloud models.
How risky are these bets? Do leaders simply put all their chips on the table and watch which hand they’ll be dealt, or do they actively manage these investments to ensure they pay off?
Quite simply, cloud governance is how teams stack the odds of success in their favor. It is how teams move from playing a game of chance to optimizing their control, so they minimize cost and risk and maximize returns.
Introducing Cloud Governance Month
As cloud investments grow, cloud governance continues to get more critical. This is a driving factor that led us to establish April as Cloud Governance Month. Throughout the month, we’ll deliver a range of tips and resources and organize a number of virtual events. Our goal is to raise awareness about cloud governance. We want to help people understand what cloud governance is, why it’s so important, and what the essential requirements are for doing it right.
Why Cloud Governance is Difficult and Critical
Cloud environments are in a constant state of flux and evolution. Cloud providers continue to innovate and expand their offerings at an increasing rate, providing enterprises with a dizzying array of tools, configuration options, platforms, and technologies. Further, for each service and workload running in the cloud, underlying resources are in a constant state of flux.
Given all this change, it gets increasingly difficult for teams to ensure security, compliance, and budgetary policies are being adhered to. Without robust and effective cloud governance capabilities, organizations are exposed to potential security breaches, budget overruns, compliance penalties, poor service levels, and catastrophic outages.
Given these risks, it’s no wonder that cloud investments start to feel like high-stakes gambling. In fact, in a survey, we found that 86% of respondents indicated that cloud governance concerns are a pivotal inhibitor to cloud adoption. [source: Stacklet, State of Cloud Governance, Insights from Q4-2021 survey] Further, without cloud governance, the advantages of the cloud are constrained. For example, to ensure policies are adhered to, security teams have to limit the options available, stifling developer speed and innovation.
How Cloud Governance as Code Can Help Hedge Your Bets
Cloud governance as code is emerging as a critical requirement for today’s enterprises. This approach champions automated management of the complex cloud ecosystem via a human-readable, declarative, and high-level language. In this way, FinOps, security, and infrastructure engineering teams can ensure policies are consistently, efficiently adhered to. At the same time, cloud governance as code gives development teams the ultimate flexibility in leveraging the complete range of cloud services to maximize collaboration, innovation, and time to market.
We encourage you to join us as we celebrate Cloud Governance Month in April 2022. Visit our Cloud Governance Month landing page to see the list of upcoming events. We’ll continue to be featuring new resources and events throughout the month. You can also subscribe or follow us on Twitter to get weekly notifications about new tips, resources, and videos as they get posted.
