In this blog post, we will discuss the management and operational principles which underpin enterprise governance in Azure which is a necessity for successful cloud adoption and one of the first rails to enable a culture that facilitates digital innovation.

The core components of Azure management are the challenges of Enterprise Cloud Adoption and the components which make up the full set of governance capabilities in Microsoft Azure.

The Azure governance principles are a continuum of tasks, projects and initiatives, therein you build natively in Cloud and also migrate workloads into Azure, securing and protecting those workloads so that they are robust and resilient. You then proceed to monitoring these workloads, so that you can pick up any problems and ensure that they are consuming resources in a manner which is both performant and cost-effective.

Next, you invest in automated configuration to ensure that any changes to your workloads are holistic but also auditable and immutable. Governance ensures that your workloads and the platform on which they run are compliant with your company’s policies and regulatory obligations. This, in turn, creates a more robust enterprise platform, ready to receive new workloads and in turn, a becomes a hub for innovation with the necessary guard rails in place.

Azure Monitoring is all about having an active view on your workloads so that you can respond quickly to any issues. Configuration in Azure involves ensuring that your workloads are deployed in a consistent and repeatable manner.

Governance consists of defining your business strategy and policies and obligations and using a variety of built-in features such as Azure Policies, Blueprint, Management Groups, Role-Based Access Control and so on, and to apply these to an enterprise regulatory framework.

Implementing a Governance framework is designed for a particular business in the cloud and shaping it to enable flexibility and agility with which business units and development teams need in order to take full advantage of running the business on the cloud platform.

Governance is not a barrier to innovation, but a strategic enabler for enterprise innovation.

Every company has governance in place today some times it is formalized as a set of rules, the most common frameworks for IT are COBIT, ITIL, COSO and FAIR ; which provides a formal structure for organizations to produce measurable results toward achieving their strategies. With the entrance to the Cloud operating model drastically changes. New services are made available and cost moves go from being CAPEX to OPEX, the potential to hyper-scale your computing it is vital to also adapt and ensure that you implement the necessary best practices, steer clear of pitfalls to facilitate a successful and continuous transformation.

Does your organization have governance in place to facilitate cloud adoption tailored for the cloud you’ve chosen? Share your experiences in the comment field below or tweet me at @UlvBjornsson