York Van den Heuvel is managing partner at Altogee. As a cloud consultant, he explains why governance is so important when migrating to the cloud.

Cloud Governance is the framework within which you prepare your organization to migrate to the cloud. It is based on a number of principles that ensure that the migration can take place in a safe and consistent manner.

Safety net

The gateway to the cloud is wide open, so to speak; you just need a credit card and off you go. But a lot can go wrong: you press 'next' a few times and suddenly you are deploying your virtual machine from an exotic location, or you have proceeded to install features that are far too heavy and therefore too expensive. Cloud Governance will manage all these issues and pitfalls so you are not faced with surprises. Of course we think of security, but the principles of governance encompass much more. Besides security (e.g. compliance with ISO standards) and identity - how am I going to give people access - principles such as cost management, automation and the organization of subscriptions are also very important.

Governance thus provides the crash barriers for your company and thanks to those crash barriers you can stay on the highway more easily and you can develop and accelerate quicker.

Utilities

Microsoft itself has set up guidelines based on the Well-Architected Framework, the Enterprise-Scale Architecture, and Cloud Governance hooks into this.

But how are we going to set these up for that? Everything is done through the initial landing zone where you are going to pick up applications or virtual machine. Should you compare the landing zone to a city, it provides gas, electricity and water so that houses can be built. The utilities in our case are then security, network, etc.

Consistency is key

So you need to make sure that the basic set-ups are ready so that you can easily hook into the cloud. This is also important for the future so that you always set these things up consistently according to the same rules. That consistency is necessary. In governance automation, we really need to look at our Infrastructure as Code (IaC). We want to set everything up in an unambiguous, consistent way and do the same thing structured all the time so that we eliminate any chance of human error.

Of course, it's best to install Cloud Governance as early as possible because over time it becomes more and more difficult to go back. You should also keep in mind that governance is constantly evolving. Because the organization changes throughout the process - for example due to ISO standards - your governance should also evolve and adapt the rules where necessary. So it is a real journey and you have to use the tooling provided by Azure in the right way. And this is the very essence of Cloud Governance.