How IT can bring order and accountability to public cloud usage without getting in the way of progress
Every technology success story is also a story of unintended
consequences. Take virtualization, for instance. Virtualization gave us
unprecedented utilization of hardware resources. It transformed a
provisioning process that used to take months into one that now takes
minutes. It gave us flexibility and speed that was once unimaginable and
formed the core foundation of the public cloud and private cloud
platforms so prevalent today.
However, with that speed and access to public clouds came the ability to
circumvent established processes, also known as “shadow IT.” Today
line-of-business teams simply swipe credit cards on public cloud
providers to get the self-service, on-demand provisioning they can’t get
from their internal IT departments.
Cloud anarchy is shadow IT’s better-behaved cousin. You’ll find it in IT
shops that centralize cloud accounts that get passed around among
different line-of-business teams, so that at least the accounting
funnels through one place in the IT bureaucracy. In truth, IT typically
doesn’t have much control over who is deploying what or where. Instead
of per-team or per-individual usage line items, IT only sees the final
bill.
Among the strengths of a cloud management platform is that it can apply
the governance IT needs without sacrificing the flexibility and speed
the business demands. Line-of-business teams get that highly prized
self-service, on-demand provisioning, and IT can anoint specific
applications -- like those passing security audits -- and dictate who is
allowed to access the applications and from where. Add metering and
billing to keep track of who is spending what, and IT gets
accountability without hampering line-of-business agility.
What does such governance look like? Here are five ways to implement
governance of public cloud usage that successfully avoids cloud anarchy:
