Govern and manage

• 6 minutes

The process of adopting the cloud is a journey, not a destination. Along the way, there are clear milestones and tangible business benefits. The final state of cloud adoption is unknown when an organization begins the journey. As your organization moves or deploys new applications to the cloud, this final state starts to form. It's important to consider the following aspects of managing and operating a cloud platform:

• Define governance solutions for your cloud environment that meet your organization's business needs, provide agility, and control risks.
• Manage your cloud environment based on the governance solutions to allow it to evolve, grow, and adapt to your organization's changing business needs.

Watch this video to learn more.

Cloud governance

Cloud governance creates guardrails that keep the organization on a safe path throughout the journey. The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure governance model identifies key areas of importance. Each area relates to different types of risks the organization must address as it adopts more cloud services.

Because governance requirements will evolve throughout the cloud adoption journey, a flexible approach to governance is required. IT governance must move quickly and keep pace with business demands to stay relevant during cloud adoption.

Incremental governance relies on a small set of corporate policies, processes, and tools to establish a foundation for adoption and governance. That foundation is called a minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP allows the governance team to quickly incorporate governance into implementations throughout the adoption lifecycle. After this MVP is deployed, additional layers of governance can be quickly incorporated into the environment.

Cloud management

The goal of the Manage methodology is to maximize ongoing business returns by creating balance between stability and operational costs. Stable business operations lead to stable revenue streams. Controlled operational costs reduce the overhead to drive more profit from the business processes.

Cloud operations creates a maturity model that helps the team fulfill commitments to the business. In the early stages of maturity, customers focus on basic needs such as inventory and visibility into cloud assets and performance. As operations in the cloud mature, the team can use cloud native or hybrid approaches to maintaining operational compliance, which reduces the likelihood of interruptions through configuration and state management. After compliance is achieved, protection and recovery services provide low-impact ways to reduce the duration and effect of business process interruptions. During platform operations, aspects of various platforms (like containers or data platforms) are adjusted and automated to improve performance.

Here are the key points from this unit:

• As your organization moves or deploys new applications to the cloud, it's important to consider these aspects of operating a cloud platform:
  • Define governance solutions for your cloud environment.
  • Manage your cloud environment.
• The Cloud Adoption Framework governance model identifies key areas of importance. Each area relates to different types of risks the organization must address as it adopts more cloud services. The Five Disciplines of Cloud Governance are Cost Management, Security Baseline, Resource Consistency, Identity Baseline, and Deployment Acceleration.

Next, let's see what you've learned about the Cloud Adoption Framework with a knowledge check.