The Importance of Cloud Services Audit and Governance

By Tanya Seda

In today’s technology world, successful IT transformation requires a clear understanding of not just the desired endpoint, but also the starting point. A key part of this transformational journey is to create efficiencies throughout the ecosystem. Now more than ever that needs to include a documented cloud strategy. There is no one answer for every enterprise and as they develop their unique approach, it’s critical that it includes both a cloud services audit and a well-thought-out governance plan. These are both crucial components to enable businesses to manage and optimize their applications through cloud technology—and it’s something that often gets missed in the planning stages.
Across our customer base, we have seen that the core drivers behind a cloud audit and governance strategic plan revolve around the following:

1. Disparate systems– Enterprises today have disparate systems throughout their infrastructure due to M&A activity, conflicting divisional priorities, and even the average tenure of the CIO and their legacy work.
2. Shadow IT– Many departments outside of IT are implementing technology. We now see that the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) often spends more than the CIO! This leads to hidden applications and capacity requirements and IT sprawl in the cloud.
3. Security– A top priority for all organizations, or it should be! In a world where data breaches number in the thousands, it should come as no surprise that security compliance can be the difference between growth and failure. You need to know what to expect from a security audit that helps with internal governance because, in some circumstances, the viability of the company can depend on it.

At Network Control we recommend conducting a cloud audit and creating a detailed governance plan. As your partner, we can help the business units perform a self-assessment and create a business impact analysis as part of the process. Depending on where the organization is on the digital maturity curve, a cloud readiness assessment and migration plan will be a great benefit to an organization.
Also useful is discovery planning, migration planning, and leveraging tools to optimize services. This can aid in the identification of interdependencies of IT systems. Network Control can also expedite the inventory process by providing a count of virtual machines (VM) by type, location, application stack, and more.

Our cloud audit includes a detailed cloud governance strategy where we analyze:

• IT Infrastructure discovery and inventory, including a high-level application view and identification of interdependencies and anomalies
• Performance requirements
• Budget considerations
• Virtualization and integration goals

Network Control can help you define a governance strategy and evaluate cloud options to determine the best alternative before moving forward with your cloud migration.

Moving to the cloud or understanding what you have currently in play may seem like a simple exercise, but in reality, it is usually ignored in favor of focusing on operational activities. Cloud services have, practically speaking, unlimited scalability, and expansion options unbeknownst to the CIO, so too does the expense if you don’t have a plan in place.