The Five Disciplines of Cloud Governance

• Any change to business processes or technology platforms introduces risk. Cloud governance teams, whose members are sometimes known as cloud custodians, are tasked with mitigating these risks and ensuring minimal interruption to adoption or innovation efforts.
  
  The Cloud Adoption Framework governance model guides these decisions (regardless of the chosen cloud platform) by focusing on development of corporate policy and the Five Disciplines of Cloud Governance. Actionable design guides demonstrate this model using Azure services. Learn about the disciplines of the Cloud Adoption Framework governance model below.
• 
  Figure 1 - Diagram of corporate policy and the Five Disciplines of Cloud Governance.

Disciplines of Cloud Governance

With any cloud platform, there are common governance disciplines that help inform policies and align toolchains. These disciplines guide decisions about the proper level of automation and enforcement of corporate policy across cloud platforms.

• 

  Cost Management

  Cost is a primary concern for cloud users. Develop policies for cost control for all cloud platforms.

• 

  Security Baseline

  Security is a complex topic, unique to each company. Once security requirements are established, cloud governance policies and enforcement apply those requirements across network, data, and asset configurations.

• 

  Identity Baseline

  Inconsistencies in the application of identity requirements can increase the risk of breach. The Identity Baseline discipline focuses ensuring that identity is consistently applied across cloud adoption efforts.

• 

  Resource Consistency

  Cloud operations depend on consistent resource configuration. Through governance tooling, resources can be configured consistently to manage risks related to onboarding, drift, discoverability, and recovery.

• 

  Deployment Acceleration

  Centralization, standardization, and consistency in approaches to deployment and configuration improve governance practices. When provided through cloud-based governance tooling, they create a cloud factor that can accelerate deployment activities.