Cloud governance and compliance
The "cloudification" of workloads will require the integration of traditional IT governance best practices, such as compliance and chargeback, into the cloud environment. Therefore, in order to govern the cloud for business excellence, IT must implement the cloud with asset and incident management, compliance, and transparent financial management.
By doing all of these things, IT is well on its way to responsible, compliant operations — with tight fiscal controls and transparency. As a result, IT can benefit from economies of scale, lower individual usage costs, and centralize infrastructure costs, while also extending or improving current governance capabilities.
In a cloud model, users pay for what they consume, increase or decrease their usage (as needed), and benefit from shared underlying resources in a policy-compliant construct that provides visibility into actual costs and provides chargeback.
Cloud governance is made up of three primary steps:
- IT-process-integration — In order to govern your cloud effectively, your IT processes should be fully integrated to ensure the extension of existing corporate governance processes into the cloud. This can be achieved through enforcing license compliance, federating your CMDB, and enabling incident and problem management.
- Continuous-compliance — Depending on your industry, you may have to meet different compliance standards, such as HIPAA (for healthcare) or PCI (for credit card retail sales). To protect your business, you will need to guarantee regulatory, operational, and security compliance by enforcing standards, auditing to ensure those standards have been met, and integrating change management to facilitate smooth and compliant transitions.
- Financial-management — The ability to track the realized cost/benefit of migrating traditional workloads to the cloud will require the integration of IT financial management into the environment. As a result, you can provide financial transparency for your cloud by enabling showback or chargeback, utilizing usage accounting, and actively managing your suppliers.
Cloud governance and compliance benefits:
- Align business metrics with IT operations
- Extend existing operational best practices to the cloud
- Ensure responsible compliant operations
- Maintain tight fiscal controls and transparency
BMC is helping organizations govern their cloud environments today. Through cloud governance and compliance, the business challenges of cloud — from compliance to costing IT — are addressed. With robust offerings in configuration compliance, regulatory compliance, and chargeback and financial management, BMC can help you provide "good governance" for applications and services moved to the cloud, infusing the tenets of Business Service Management throughout the cloud environment.
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