GreenButton

Continuing on our mission to talk further about the 2013 cloud computing trends which we wrote about in our press release titled ‘GreenButton Identifies Top 2013 Cloud Computing Trends‘, we’d like to talk a bit about the issue of Cloud Governance – A significant challenge for enterprise organizations.

When we speak about cloud governance, we’re talking about security and managing spending in the cloud – topics including compliance and access policies. One of the areas that organizations who are building out cloud environments often miss is that, despite the handoff of certain IT functions, the responsibility around governance still remains at home. The magnitude of this problem is greatly exacerbated when multiple cloud vendors enter the equation such as in Hybrid Cloud scenarios.

Within the structure of traditional IT, companies tend to skirt some of the real governance challenges by clamping down on certain deployment scenarios and keeping anything questionable within the four walls and security controls of internal IT. That's not so easy with a true cloud environment, which mixes it up between private and public clouds, ultimately with applications running between the two, depending on demand and use case. Agility is a wonderful aspect of cloud computing, but with that come the issues of security and cost control.

Cloud governance is a critical challenge for enterprises and becoming an even larger issue. As the number of applications in the cloud increase multi-fold, the scale of those applications and the number of people involved in operating those applications increases, IT will continue to be tasked with answering three critical questions: How does the enterprise maintain cloud operations security with so many disparate interests? How do cloud operations demonstrate compliance with required laws and regulations? How can financial controls and incentives be applied to cloud operations with support for chargebacks across an organization?

We believe that maintaining control while delivering the agility of cloud computing will be an ongoing topic of conversation in 2013. With so many disparate interests, enterprise organizations will need to maintain cloud operations securely. In order to do so, they will be choosing tools that manage encryption and access controls across hundreds or thousands of users.  Additionally, the use of automation for easy and secure implementation of tight security restrictions across multiple clouds will be put into effect.  

In 2013, there will be a vital need for tighter governance of public cloud spending in the enterprise as well as careful evaluation of the risks associated with public cloud use. And to that point – we think that come the course of next year, management titles will begin to appear along the lines of CCSO – Chief Cloud Security Officer.

As enterprise organizations shift portions of their IT budgets to the cloud – an operational rather than capital expense line item – they will be struggling with the lack of governance controls built into the major cloud offerings. CIOs and CFOs will be demanding fine-grained reporting of cloud usage to support charge back across departments. We will also see a wider need for capped spending across these different entities to avoid the all too common problem of leaving unused virtual machines running for days/weeks on end. These controls need to mature and will do over the next 12 months.