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Cloud Policy & Governance

Definition

Policy and Governance can be thought of as a set of statements of intent, with associated assurances of adherence.

A “Cloud Policy” is a clear statement of intent, describing the execution of specific cloud-related activities in accordance with a standard model designed to deliver some improvement of business value.

“Cloud Governance” is a set of processes, tooling or other guardrail solution that aims to control the activity as described by the Cloud Policy to promote the desired behaviour and outcomes.

Combining good Policy and Governance provides us with a mechanism to orchestrate and direct our Cloud FinOps Activity.

Maturity Assessment

WHERE ARE ORGANIZATIONS IN TERMS OF MATURITY

Crawl

34.4%

Walk

51.4%

Run

14.2%

Organizations with cloud governance policies implemented across all their FinOps personas were in cohorts operating at Run maturity. These policies ranged from provisioning and allocation requirements to IAM role and SME ownership policies. Responses showed most organizations had adopted some formal governance policies, with the majority being in cohorts operating their cloud cost management practices at a FinOps Walk maturity


In the early stages of cloud adoption, everything is new and everyone is a pioneer. Bit by bit the organization learns how to make the best use of cloud technology and harness it to achieve its goals. Policy & Governance is the primary mechanism for harnessing the power of cloud.

Maturity Description Focus
Crawl Cloud Policy & Governance exists as part of overall business policy. Policies aim to control most significant risks to business value. Basic usage & rate optimization, etc as they apply to individual engineering teams and products.
Walk Cloud Policy & Governance measures are broadened and standardized. Best practices are now being distributed and adopted across the business. Cross-functional collaboration. Integration with existing organizational policies and standards.
Run Cloud Policy & Governance is now closely integrated with overall business strategy. All levels of business now operate in a way that is aligned with the organization’s strategy and goals.

 


Functional Activity

written for each persona responsible for the functional activity and processes encapsulated by his Capability. each one should be associated generally to one of the FinOps Phases (Inform, Optimize, Operate). for example:

As a [FinOps Persona], I will [functional activity] so that [desired outcome] is achieved.

Measure(s) of Success

Measures of CP&G Crawl Walk Run
Scope of CP&G Across Engineering teams Cross-functional, across Business, Technical & Finance teams Across the organization, linking CP&G to strategic goals
Creating & Updating Manually, ad-hoc, largely reactive policy creation Regular review cadence, proactive FinOps policies Ongoing automated policy compliance review, with trending
Documenting & Communicating Static, manually distributed content KMS / training integrated solutions Integration with new architectural concepts to ensure currency
Monitoring for Compliance Manual analysis & reporting Vendor-provided automated analytics (eg. AWS Config) Multi-cloud/enriched normalised insights & automation solution

Best Practice:

The 5 FACES of Good Cloud Policy & Governance:

Headline Description
FOCUSED on achieving the objectives we seek
ALIGNED with the organisations goals, strategy and principles
CLEAR simply stated and easy for everyone to understand
EFFICIENT low comparative cost of implementation vs benefit
SUPPORTED by the authority required in order to enforce it

Inputs

Governance

Governance implements Policy through:

Policy

If a policy is poorly conceived or expressed, of dubious authority, too broad or general to be useful in practice, or imposes a cost on the organization that is out of proportion to its benefit, it is a bad policy.
Some examples of good policy statements might be:


Cloud Provider Governance & Policy Resources

Cloud Providers Governance & Policy Tools

Get Involved

Get involved and contribute to the community by sharing your real world experiences related to this Capability in the form of a story or providing a playbook for how you have implemented best practices in your organization. Your real world experiences can be provided in the context of:

Join the conversation about this Capability in Slack . You can submit stories, how-tos and suggest improvements using one of the options for contributing here.

Related Domains

Featured Resources

Addressing Build vs Buy - James Jackson & Patrick Raymond (Ternary)

Addressing Build vs Buy - James Jackson & Patrick Raymond (Ternary)

Automating away spreadsheets from AWS Bill processing - James Regennitter & Abhash Bhandary (Pearson)

Automating away spreadsheets from AWS Bill processing - James Regennitter & Abhash Bhandary (Pearson)

Create a FinOps Culture Focused on Governance - Lucas Paratore (VMWare) & Jenna Gegg (Salesforce)

Create a FinOps Culture Focused on Governance - Lucas Paratore (VMWare) & Jenna Gegg (Salesforce)

Capability Assets