Cloud is the new normal; almost, all the enterprises have been going through or at least planning their cloud adoption. Gone are the days, enterprise IT deals with big chunks of metal.
Though the cloud adoption is at its peak, I rarely see democratized cloud adoption in enterprises. Cloud is often used as a centralized IT hosting solution. In this article, let’s analyze the issues for such cases, and what are the options available in Azure to enable democratized cloud adoption with enterprise governance.
It is predicted that, 83% of the workloads will be running in some form of cloud in 2020, where 41% on public cloud.
Cloud is not only the successor of IT assets and management, but also, it has evolved to provide agility and innovation at scale. These aspects, have been changing the way organizations deal with technology along with other techno-cultural and techno-commercial shifts like DevOps, PaaS and Opex.
As per the above graph, the key motives are agility, DevOps and innovative aspects.
In order to leverage the full potential of the cloud, it is mandatory for the enterprise IT to deliver cloud with its real essence. This will help the cloud adoption, without putting the key motives under threat.
If your enterprise has cloud but still require calls, emails and requests to spin up a resources or to make change, it kills the agility the cloud naturally offers. It’s like buying a Ferrari and restricting it to go in 20 kmph.
Once the agility is killed, innovation is blocked, and soon the cloud becomes a mere hosting solution.
A successful enterprise cloud adoption is not just things are in the cloud, it should be democratized with proper governance, in order to leverage the agility whilst maintaining the governance.
What makes the enterprises not to democratize their cloud adoption?
In most enterprises, the cloud adoption is strictly controlled by the IT, often tampering the autonomy of the business agility and digital transformation cadence. There are several reasons for this.
- Cloud Sprawl – Organizations fear cloud sprawl, cloud sprawl refers to the unwanted/uncontrolled cloud footprint, which leads to unnecessary cost.
- Security – Concerns about security implementations, how the resources should be created, linked, managed and monitored. This knowledge mostly stays with the IT teams and often sensitive, this leads the IT to keep the management within themselves.
- Governance and Policies – Organizational policies in terms of access levels and governance should be adhered, this is an organizational knowledge (internal) where it often remains tacit. Example – Organizational policies in firewall settings? Patch administration and etc.
- Unified Tools and licenses – Larger enterprises, especially who have complex IT structure should leverage the maximum return of investments they have made on tools and licenses. So certain tools and licenses are commonly used and certain things are prohibited (partner relationships also play a significant role here). Historically, IT has the knowledge and the relationship management of these tools and license offerings, it creates a dependency on IT to decide on tools and licenses. Example – What license to bring to cloud? what are the available ones? Do we have any alternative tools in-house and etc.
- Lack of cloud knowledge – Lack of knowledge about the cloud and offerings. Business stakeholders often get confused and try to compare things in wrong ways, this kind of experience often leads the IT to keep the cloud as a black box as possible and forces the IT to centrally manage the cloud.
- Centralized culture – Enterprises have cultural problems that often create authoritative and knowledge pools, which blocks the democratization of the technology and decision making.
With all these challenges, Finding the right balance between autonomy and the governance is the key.
What Azure has in place?
Earlier, Azure subscriptions are part of a tenant, and under the subscription we have resource groups and then the resources. This hierarchy is very basic and it does not have the flexibility to govern and mange enterprise complexity.
Azure got a new hierarchical elements in structuring enterprise cloud footprint closer to the organizational structure.
The below figure shows the current new structure.
These management groups can have policies to ensure the governance. Policies can be set at any level. Policies by default inherit the permissions from the level above.
Policies can be very granular like which restrict resource types, SKUs and locations, policies to ensure security aspects like patch, endpoint controls and etc.
Use Cases and structuring
There’s no hard and fast rule on how do we structure the management groups and subscriptions, but it is often better to follow the organizational decision tree. Below are some common structuring approaches.
One organization with departmental separation
Global organization with geographic footprint
Conglomerates
Once the right policies are in place, IT can take a relax approach, like a development team shouldn’t create that big VM, you are always afraid of.
Though, the above hierarchical approach gives lots of flexibility, in certain cases still you may find challenges to address the hierarchical management, especially in the group of companies, where each company has its own CIO office and some policies are controlled centrally. Also, when these business units use different tenants it adds more complexity to the picture.
Regardless, of the tools – the key point I want to stress out from this article is – in enterprise cloud adoption IT teams and management should focus on democratizing the IT much as possible whilst maintaining the governance policies intact. Too much control at central place will tamper the agility of the cloud and kills the momentum of the digital transformation.
Source: Frost & Sullivan, 2017
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