For those responsible for managing infrastructure, the concept of governance is common, especially as it relates to cloud services. For cloud services, it’s defined as a framework that guides how end users use these services by defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, improve efficiency and accelerate deployment.
The term is often associated with “rules” or “compliance” and can restrain innovation within an organization, as it typically is mixed with regulatory bodies and governance procedures that add cycles to required tasks. But what if we could flip the script and make governance more of a collaborative effort? What if we used an approach wherein teams across an organization share information and feedback for better business outcomes?
This collaborative approach can be beneficial in ensuring everyone is on the same page, enabling businesses to get the most out of their cloud infrastructure while ensuring costs stay within budgets.
Legacy Governance Overshadows Growth and Creativity
Legacy governance is an extremely paranoid way of running your business. For example, blocking people or departments from making buying decisions is a perceived best practice to avoid overspending on cloud infrastructure. Unfortunately, this is actually the opposite of what organizations with cloud infrastructure should do.
The advantage of the cloud is that it gives your organization the ability to develop and bring products to market faster—and at a lower price point—than traditional methods. Following legacy governance processes—adding more steps to the process for provisioning resources—results in slower launch times and overprovisioning of resources (since there is a lack of visibility and teams are not sure when they will get more), negating the cost benefits of on-demand cloud infrastructure over traditional data centers.
Empowered Employees Produce the Best Results
Think about it: An overbearing manager or boss makes you feel like you’re walking on eggshells when it comes to your work. Sometimes, this is the same effect legacy governance policies can have on employees.
Removing access barriers and giving team members the freedom to easily request and use resources should be a cloud operator’s ultimate ambition. It’s also cost management that’s collaborative.
The idea behind a collaborative approach to managing costs is that the individuals who work on the projects themselves–whether that is the engineering team, DevOps teams, etc.–are best suited to manage them and provide the proper infrastructure recommendations because they know what their needs are.
To receive the full financial and organizational benefits from a collaborative approach, there are three simple steps to take:
Have a Consistent Source of Truth
Have a consistent and agreed-upon source of truth for decision-making and self-evaluation against key metrics. This means that everyone in the business—executives, finance, managers and individual contributors—are aligned and looking at the same numbers. When this happens, teams spend less time haggling about ownership and more time looking at how they can improve. When this doesn’t happen, the focus turns to storytelling about why the numbers are wrong, not solving the underlying inefficiency problem.
Trust the Team
Trust the members of your organization to leverage this information for the best possible business outcomes.
Collaborate
Encourage collaboration inside and between layers of the business to ensure the decisions are made with the complete picture in mind.
Implicit tradeoffs are made every day at every business level for teams to align their work to organizational priorities. Encouraging collaboration between different layers, viewpoints and skillsets in the business helps to highlight these implicit decisions and make them explicit, intentional and agreed-upon
Moving away from legacy governance to a more collaborative approach is within reach for any organization. The key is understanding what methods are required for the transition to be a seamless and positive experience that teams will embrace.