Cloud services have grown significantly over the years. Still, it has challenges, such as managing cloud environments effectively, ensuring security, compliance, cost efficiency, and overall operational effectiveness. According to a Gartner report, worldwide end-user public cloud spending is forecast to grow 20.4% to a total of $675.4 billion this year, up from $561 billion in 2023. This growth is driven by generative AI (GenAI) and application modernization.

Key to understanding governance and its implementation in various cloud journeys (providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure):

• Understanding the core principles and use cases of cloud governance. 
• The importance of implementing cloud governance. 
• How can you set up a Cloud Governance Framework for your Organization?
• How can you establish robust multi-cloud governance using tools like Firefly, emphasizing continuous monitoring and policy management? 

Cloud Governance Explained

Cloud Governance refers to the framework of policies, permissions, roles, responsibilities, and processes that control how an organization's cloud computing resources are used and managed. It ensures that cloud environments are secure, compliant with regulations, cost-effective, and aligned with the organization’s overall business objectives irrespective of the cloud provider (such as AWS, Azure, and GCP).

The Key Components of Cloud Governance

To understand the core principles of cloud governance better, let us consider an organization using cloud providers like GCP, Azure, and AWS to deploy their infrastructure:

Policy and Risk Management 

As an organization, you must establish guidelines and enforce policies for cloud usage, including access control of cloud resources and data security against breaches. You must also identify and mitigate risks associated with your cloud. You need to ensure that you have an efficient, secure, and reliable cloud infrastructure.

AWS Organizations allows you to manage your multi-account structure using policies. For example, you can automate the account creation process and attach user-defined groups. This will instantly apply the access policies attached to the user roles, ensuring touchless infrastructure deployments and easy audits. You can automate the provisioning of your AWS accounts, which are preconfigured to meet your business, security, and compliance requirements using AWS Control Tower. AWS Trusted Advisor provides real-time guidance on provisioning your resources according to AWS best practices. It also receives recommendations on improving its infrastructure’s security, such as applying the least privileges to a role to access cloud services. It helps enhance infrastructure performance and cost-effectiveness by suggesting resizing instances or using reserved instances to prevent cost overrun.

On the other hand, Azure Advisor provides personalized best practices recommendations for your Azure resources, such as enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA), configuring network security groups (NSGs), and ensuring encryption for sensitive data to improve threat detection and security. Azure Management Groups and Azure Subscriptions manage multiple accounts and policies. For example, you have multiple departments and teams requiring separate Azure subscriptions. You should implement Azure Management Groups to centrally implement the regulations such as correct tagging policies, restrict the resource type deployment, grant specific roles and permissions to different teams or users, product owner having more permissions than the developers, audit it, and aggregate cost and billing information across multiple subscriptions. 

Meanwhile, with Google Cloud Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver), you can monitor, log, and diagnose to ensure your cloud applications' health and performance, which helps you with threat and failure detection of your running application or database recovery. As cloud engineers, you might prefer other tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and Firefly to help you monitor various resources, irrespective of which cloud provider these resources belong to.

Security and Compliance Management

Organizations must implement a cloud strategy to build a secure and regulated environment.

As per the EU (European Union), an organization must implement the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) Law to maintain data privacy. For example, this law requires companies to secure data, not share without consent, and allow individuals to access and delete their data upon request. They also need to report data breaches within 72 hours. 

US citizens' medical records and other health information data are protected under HIPAA, also known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. For example, a US hospital must ensure that all patient data is encrypted and only accessible to the hospital.

Refer to the CIS (Center for Internet Security) Benchmarks to ensure that the best practices are implemented to secure system configurations, such as password policies, network settings, and the configuration of security features like firewalls and antivirus software.

SOC 2 (Service Organization Control 2) is used to manage and safeguard customer data. The operational controls are focused on the safety and privacy of user data, which demonstrates to clients that their data is safe and the service is reliable. It is a framework designed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA).

If you are onboarded on AWS, you can get on-demand access to AWS’s Business Associate Addendum (BAA) required for HIPAA compliance and AWS’s GDPR Data Processing Addendum (DPA) using AWS Artifact. AWS Config helps you track if you are configured according to CIS benchmarks. Collecting, analyzing, auditing, and updating your cloud services data is a burden. You can automate the evidence-collection process using AWS Audit Manager, reducing manual effort and the risk of missing critical data for SOC 2 compliance.

Also, using Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP), you can identify and redact sensitive information, such as user passwords and credentials, from data streams to comply with privacy regulatory requirements. Google Cloud Security Command Center (SCC) helps you detect and mitigate security risks, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.

Cost Management

An organization must be cost-efficient and optimize its cloud expenditures. To do this, it must enable monitoring to keep track and achieve cost savings. 

For your AWS environment, you should use AWS Cost Explorer, which provides a detailed view of cloud costs and usage. By analyzing this report, you can delete your unused resources, such as the EKS cluster and unused instances in the Frankfurt region. AWS Budgets helps you set custom cost and usage budgets for AWS resources like EC2 instances and receive alerts when you exceed them.

If you are using Azure Cloud, use Azure Cost Management and Billing, which helps you monitor spending across multiple subscriptions and resource groups to identify areas for cost reduction. You can also estimate the cost of the Azure services required for your cloud infrastructure using the Azure Pricing Calculator.

If you use GCP, the finance team uses Google Cloud Billing Reports to track spending trends and optimize resource usage. They set budgets and alerts to prevent overspending in their financial management.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

You can control access to cloud services and resources using IAM, which plays a crucial role in cloud security. It ensures that no unauthorized access is granted to a team or an individual. Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), single sign-on (SSO), and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to control access based on user roles and permissions.

Suppose your organization is onboarded on the AWS platform. In that case, you can securely manage access to your AWS services and resources by creating and managing AWS users and groups. For example, developers get access to development resources, administrators have full access, and finance teams can view billing information. 

You can use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to securely login to multiple applications using single sign-on (SSO). Just like other cloud providers, you can implement multi-factor authentication (MFA). Azure AD conditional access policies require MFA based on user location, device, or application being accessed to secure the sensitive data.

Google Cloud Identity and Access Management helps you centrally manage users by assigning predefined roles (like Viewer, Editor, Owner) or custom roles to users or groups. For example, you can create a service account with the necessary permissions and assign it to your GKE application, ensuring secure and isolated access and allowing your GKE to access Google Cloud Storage.

Understanding the Importance of Cloud Governance: A With-vs-Without Comparison

Effective Cloud Governance helps you make your cloud environment secure, cost-effective, and compliant with policies and regulations. Let us understand why you should implement Cloud Governance. 

Enhanced Security and Curb Shadow IT 

Organizations can protect their cloud infrastructure against cyber threats, unauthorized access, and data breaches by using robust governance policies, which ensures that security best practices are followed consistently. 

For example, a financial services company stores the sensitive customer data, such as credentials, financial transactions, and personal information in Dynamo DB or S3 bucket.

• Without Cloud Governance: If the access controls are not properly configured, sensitive customer information is exposed, leading to financial loss and damage to the company's reputation.
• With Cloud Governance: There are strict access controls in place, such as RBAC policy and least privileges, encryption, regular security audits, and proactive monitoring are enforced. Data is protected from breaches, and customer trust is maintained.

Increase Regulatory Compliance 

It is important that your cloud environment is compliant with various regulations and standards, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2, reducing the risk of legal penalties and reputational damage.

For example, a healthcare provider firm stores its patient records in the AWS and must comply with HIPAA regulations.

• Without Cloud Governance: The firm fails to comply with HIPAA standards, imposing penalties on them.
• With Cloud Governance: RBAC policies are used for regulated and granular access, regular audits are conducted, and ensures all data handling practices meet HIPAA requirements preventing the organization from any compliance issue or hazard.

Optimize Resources and Infrastructure

Effective governance enables organizations to track and manage cloud spending, identify wasteful expenditures, and optimize resource utilization, leading to significant cost savings.

For example, An e-commerce company scales its cloud infrastructure to handle seasonal traffic spikes.

• Without Cloud Governance: After the peak season, company resources continue in the same configuration since scaling down is not automated or audited, leading to unnecessarily high costs for unused services.
• With Cloud Governance: The company implements automated scaling policies that adjust resources based on demand. This significantly reduces cost during off-peak times.

Maximize Operational Efficiency

Cloud governance can help you improve operational efficiency by defining clear roles, responsibilities, and processes to get the most out of cloud resources while aligning with business goals.

For example, a software team deploys its resources on the AWS cloud for development and testing environments.

• Without Cloud Governance: Developers use the AWS console to manually provision and de-provision resources, leading to delays and inconsistent environments.
• With Cloud Governance: The Team uses automation to deploy, manage and destroy the cloud infrastructure with consistent configurations reducing errors, and improving the speed.

Improved Risk Management

Governance frameworks help identify and mitigate risks associated with cloud computing, such as data loss, service outages, and vendor lock-in.

For example, a global enterprise wants to do a disaster recovery for its applications hosted on GCP.

• Without Cloud Governance: The company lacks a coordinated disaster recovery strategy, leading to prolonged downtime and data loss during a major outage.
• With Cloud Governance: A comprehensive disaster recovery plan is implemented for the relational database and GKE, with regular backups and failover procedures minimizing downtime and data loss, preventing business loss.

Capturing Accurate Metrics

Organizations can capture the cloud operations performed on cloud providers, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, enabling better monitoring, reporting, and management of cloud resources.

For example, a marketing agency is managing multiple streams of projects across various cloud platforms.

• Without Cloud Governance: The organization struggles to keep track of its resource usage, and policies across multiple cloud platforms leading to budget overruns.
• With Cloud Governance: Centralized monitoring and reporting tools provide visibility into resource usage, security, compliance, and performance, which helps in decisions such as effective resource allocation, stay within budget, and make informed decisions over unused or underutilized resources.

Setting Up a Cloud Governance Framework with Firefly

Setting up a cloud governance framework involves a systematic approach to ensure that cloud services align with an organization's policies, regulations, and business goals. We have listed the key steps that you can follow to establish an effective cloud governance framework:

• Identify your Governance requirements and define the scope. 
• Establish a governance team and implement access and security policies.
• Continuously monitor and audit your cloud infrastructure.

Managing multi-cloud environments to ensure security, compliance, cost control, and policy management for each cloud provider can be complex and expensive, with each provider having its own set of tools. Firefly offers a comprehensive cloud governance solution, making it easier to maintain control over your cloud infrastructure while adhering to industry standards and organizational policies.

Security and Compliance Checks

Firefly helps you ensure your infrastructure is secure against compliance standards like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), HIPAA, SOC 2, and CIS benchmarks, ensuring continuous compliance without any manual effort.

You can verify the PCI DSS compliance of your cloud infrastructure under Governance, which helps your team improve the security of the less compliant assets. The infrastructure is only 46% PCI DSS compliant, as shown in the image below:

You can check if your infrastructure is SOC 2 compliant under Governance. As shown below, it is only 43% SOC 2 compliant, which means it is at risk.

You can get the data on HIPPA compliance by navigating to the HIPPA section under Governance. In the below image, the infrastructure is 87% HIPAA compliant:

Policy-Based Governance

Firefly allows you to define policies for your cloud resources, ensuring that all resources are tagged correctly, configured securely, and managed effectively according to organizational standards.

Tagging policies helps you easily track and manage resources, giving you more detailed insights into cloud spending and helping you identify the resources that require specific security controls or compliance measures.

You can go to the Tagging Policies under Framework in the Firefly Governance and see the resources for which the tags are not present as per the attached policy, as shown below:

If you hover or click on one of the items, for example, EC2 instance, you will be able to see the policy description of how tagging policy can help you with your infrastructure and how its impact is severe, as shown below:

Cost Management

Firefly helps you optimize your infrastructure cost through its Cloud Waste feature from the Dashboard or Governance. It helps you monitor and cut down on unnecessary expenses by providing insights into cloud spending and suggestions on efficiency and saving costs across various integrated cloud service providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure as shown below:

If you hover over or click on a resource on the Cloud Waste screen, you will see the cost optimization suggestion Firefly has for you. For example, in the image given below, this EC2 instance has not been used for the last six months:

Visibility and Inventory

Firefly lets you see your resources in your cloud environment, avoiding sprawl and ensuring all resources are accounted for under Inventory. Head over to the inventory to gain a detailed insight into the cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, based on the following parameters as shown in the image below:

• The data source displays the cloud provider and integrated accounts.
• The location of resource deployment.
• The type of asset or resource.
• The resource owner
• The IaC types like CloudFormation and Terraform.
• The IaC stack can be the s3 bucket where the state file is stored.
• The resource creation year.
• The governance policies insights.
• IaC ignored resources.
• And the cloud assets that have been deleted.

Firefly provides a unified dashboard for monitoring and managing AWS, Azure, and GCP assets from a single interface. This centralized visibility helps improve efficiency.

Drift Detection

Firefly’s drift detection capabilities ensure that your infrastructure complies with your infrastructure automation, preventing security risks due to unauthorized changes in your cloud environment. These changes are quickly identified and remediated, maintaining the desired state of your infrastructure. You can see this in your Dashboard and Inventory.

Using the Firefly, you can also send notifications if any drift is detected by selecting the event type as drift detection.

Enhanced Security

Firefly’s security posture management highlights potential security risks with level of severity and provides actionable recommendations to improve your cloud security, helping to prevent breaches and data loss.

If you hover over or select an item in this list, such as the VPC subnet with medium severity risk, you will see that you can improve your security by removing public IP access.

Getting Started? Start with Answers

An effective cloud governance strategy is essential for any organization leveraging cloud technologies. It helps you manage your cloud resources, ensuring security, compliance, cost-efficiency, and alignment with business objectives. Organizations can make the most out of cloud computing by implementing a robust cloud governance framework while minimizing risks and inefficiencies. Using Firefly, you can govern your resources irrespective of the cloud provider and save the overhead cost of using too many tools.‍

Here are answers to some of the internets's most frequently asked questions.

Q1. Why is Cloud Governance Important?

Cloud governance ensures security, compliance, cost management, and operational efficiency. It helps organizations manage risks, meet regulatory requirements, and align cloud usage with business goals.

Q2. What are the Key Components of Cloud Governance?

Key components include:

• Policy Management: Defining and enforcing policies for cloud usage.
• Access Management: Controlling who can access cloud resources and what they can do.
• Cost Management: Monitoring and optimizing cloud spending.
• Security Management: Protecting data and resources from unauthorized access and breaches.
• Compliance Management: Ensures compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
• Monitoring and Reporting: Continuously monitoring cloud activities and generating reports for transparency.

Q3. What Frameworks are Commonly Used for Cloud Governance?

Common frameworks include:

• AWS Well-Architected Framework: Provides best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud.
• Azure Cloud Adoption Framework: Guides organizations through cloud adoption and governance.
• Google Cloud Architecture Framework: Offers principles and best practices for building and managing solutions on Google Cloud.

Q4. What Tools Can Help with Cloud Governance?

Tools that aid in cloud governance include:

• AWS Organizations: These are used to manage multiple AWS accounts and apply policies.
• Azure Policy: This is for creating, assigning, and managing policies in Azure.
• Google Cloud Resource Manager: It helps organize and manage cloud resources.
• CloudHealth: For cloud cost management, security, and compliance.
• Turbonomic: For application resource management and cost optimization.

→ To request a personalized demo of the Firefly platform, get in touch.