Governance disciplines
Common governance disciplines within cloud platforms inform policies, align toolchains, and help organizations determine how best to automate and enforce corporate policies across their unique cloud platforms.
The following table summarizes each discipline from the Govern methodology in the Cloud Adoption Framework:
|
Cost Management discipline: Cost is a primary concern for cloud users. Develop policies for cost control for all cloud platforms. |
|
Security Baseline discipline: Security is a complex subject that's 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 discipline: Inconsistencies in the application of identity requirements can increase the risk of breach. The Identity Baseline discipline focuses on ensuring that identity is consistently applied across cloud-adoption efforts. |
|
Resource Consistency discipline: 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 discipline: 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. |
Cost Management discipline
This discipline focuses on scaling the operational best practices for cost management across all workloads and assets in your portfolio.
This discipline would help Tailwind Traders address the following risk:
- Overspending in the cloud
Later, we demonstrate how Tailwind Traders can add cost controls to its governance foundation.
Security Baseline discipline
This discipline focuses on automating the application of security principles to ensure consistency across your environment.
Figure 1: The Security Baseline discipline.
This discipline would help Tailwind Traders address the following risks:
- The organization not meeting security or compliance requirements
- Unauthorized access compromising systems or data
Identity Baseline discipline
After you've established identity and access requirements for your cloud environment, this discipline ensures that those requirements are consistently applied to all workloads and assets.
Figure 2: The Identity Baseline discipline.
This discipline would help Tailwind Traders to address the following risk:
- Unauthorized access compromising systems or data
Resource Consistency discipline
Resource consistency focuses on the initial organization of the resources that are required to establish a foundation for governance. In the long term, this discipline focuses on proper onboarding processes to ensure that all assets meet any operational support requirements.
Figure 3: The Resource Consistency discipline.
This discipline would help Tailwind Traders address the following risks:
- Operations management issues or oversights
Later, we apply this discipline to the early needs of our customer narrative for Tailwind Traders.
Deployment Acceleration discipline
Automating governance leads to automation in adoption. Providing infrastructure as code (IaC) templates to the various adoption teams helps them quickly deploy workloads into compliant, well-managed environments.
Figure 4: The Deployment Acceleration discipline.
This discipline would help Tailwind Traders to address the following risk:
- Inconsistent governance due to immature processes and lack of skills on the team
The five disciplines of the Govern methodology in the Cloud Adoption Framework help establish the right collection of processes, tools, and automation to address common risks and concerns. Understanding these disciplines can help Tailwind Traders discover and address tangible risks and concerns, and then address them against a prioritized backlog.
In the next units, we'll explore technical solutions to help you get started with a cloud-governance foundation to support each discipline. We also look at some technical solutions that address risks related to managing costs.