Over the past five years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with more than half a dozen Fortune 500 clients as well as several government agencies in various contexts. There is one thing that every one of these organizations had in common – all of them needed a Hybrid Cloud Governance Strategy and none of them had one. I’m sure that there are a few organizations out there that have tackled this already, but if there are, they’ve certainly jumped well ahead of the curve. Adoption of a Hybrid mix of Cloud and non-cloud capabilities has quite literally exploded in the past few years. There are few if any enterprises that haven’t already begun moving down that path. However, this is definitely a case where the technology trend is outpacing our ability to integrate it into business operations and processes (at least in a fairly well-defined or unified manner).
The time has definitely come where this is no longer a nice to have or something for trailblazers only. Today, every enterprise needs to tackle the challenge of immediate or near-term Hybrid capability management. And it might be better referred to that way because if we were only concerned about the Cloud portions of what the enterprise were managing, then we’d still only be dealing with a partial landscape. Here are a few reasons why you need it…
1 – Because piecemeal governance is ineffective. In order to meet service level expectations or objectives with clients, there has to be a comprehensive ability to manage all of the resources that support such a capability, regardless of how that capability may actually be distributed. Now, there may always be some dispute as to what exactly “management” represents given that some Cloud providers will give limited access or control rights to their infrastructure, which begs the question – can you manage something you don’t control? The answer to that is a yes, you can – but let’s specify what we’re referring to as management:
- You can manage access control from your user base to the capability
- You can manage capacity planning and execution
- You can manage upgrades, enhancements and expansion of the user base (in tandem with the provider/s)
- You can manage network security expectations (to and from your various capability elements)
You can manage integration between capability elements or between separate capabilities
2 – Because Holistic Governance has always been an area for improvement, now it is a necessity: Most organizations have had some challenges implementing or maintaining Governance processes (I discussed this recently in another post on Data Governance). What tends to happen more often than not is that an organization settles into one or two subsets of Governance, for example a focus on Data Governance or Portfolio Governance. But Governance can cut across everything, from SDLC to Security, to Architecture to ITIL – basically Governance could or should touch every core process in the enterprise. Dealing with new Hybrid Cloud capabilities presents an excellent opportunity to tackle an age old problem.
3 – Because where there is more complexity, there needs to be more cooperation to effectively coordinate: One major advantage of managing all of one’s own capability on premise is at least the potential that a single point contact or service provider may be available to help coordinate everything. With a Hybrid Enterprise, the number of diverse providers and teams may increase quite a bit. And while you won’t likely have a single POC anymore, you can mitigate that through implementation of a single process.
4 – Because this diversification of capability will likely continue for some time to come. The trend towards greater capability diversification is likely to accelerate quite a bit in the coming years. While there will be exceptions where some organizations will migrate all of their capability to one Cloud provider (like AWS), this will definitely not be the norm. We are going to retain some on premise capability for a long time, especially where mainframe technology is involved and there will be a wide variety of other SaaS players that will continue to pull the typical enterprise in multiple directions
So how can your organization get started with Hybrid Cloud Governance? Here are a couple of suggestions…
1 – Create a Capability Inventory (coordinate with provider inventory). This suggestion is generally a worthwhile exercise anyway, particularly as a planning or strategy aid. It is typically done up front and can be relatively quick. Capability can be viewed in multiple contexts, the two most common being; Business Capability and Technical Capability.
2 – Determine your metrics approach and standardize it across capabilities. This is sometimes tricky in that Cloud providers often have different types of SLAs and SLOs, but rather than trying to map to everyone else’s definitions, set up your own and map everyone’s to that.
3 – Dedicate a team to facilitate it. This doesn’t have to be big team, in some organizations it might even be one person. The important thing to keep in mind though is if you don’t have someone dedicated to cross the capability barriers, then things will likely remained stove-piped.
Copyright 2016, Stephen Lahanas
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