“Governance” is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit in the world of cloud cost management.
This term is often used to refer to a top-down, fear-motivated type of control that stifles innovation at the edge of an organization. Governance often shows up in the same breath as the word “compliance,” and can feel inextricably intertwined with regulatory bodies and requirement checklists. Doing business this way is a holdover from the pre-cloud days.
But what if “governance” could become something more collaborative, like information-sharing and feedback-gathering from the edge of your business, in service of better business outcomes? This type of collaboration can be a powerful tool for alignment in your business, allowing you to cut down on operational inefficiency and get the most from your cloud.
Legacy Governance: Too Much Control Stifles Innovation and Growth
Legacy governance has the appeal of seeming like the “safe” choice. As in, “It’s hard to overspend on cloud infrastructure when people are gated from making buying decisions.” This way of operating looks and feels a lot buying hardware for data centers — a process companies on a cloud transformation journey are already comfortable with.
The value proposition of cloud is that it gives your organization the ability to build and launch products at a faster pace and lower cost than traditional data center infrastructure. Taking the legacy governance route — adding layers into the process for provisioning resources — results in a slower time to market and over-provisioning of resources (since teams don’t know when they’ll be allowed to ask for more), diminishing or completely eliminating the cost improvement of on-demand infrastructure over traditional DCs.
Collaborative Cost Management: Empowered Employees Make the Best Decisions
Allowing members of an organization to responsibly request and utilize the resources they need without barriers to access or unexpected cost overages is the dream of cloud operators everywhere, as well as the definition of collaborative cost management.
The premise of collaborative cost management is that members at the edge of your organization are best positioned to review savings recommendations on the infrastructure they manage because they know the workloads and can accurately triage each recommendation based on feasibility, level of effort, and impact to ensure the highest value opportunities are taken while also focusing on other key initiatives like stability, reliability and revenue generation.
If you can avoid getting sucked into “harm-prevention mode” and give people the latitude and tools they need to do their jobs, you will create the opportunity for better overall business outcomes and a more engaged engineering organization.
Get out of the Legacy Governance Spiral!
Migrating from legacy governance to collaborative cost management is possible for any organization. The key is understanding what tools and processes are required for the transition to be successful, and how to roll these out in a way that will be embraced instead of rejected.
To get a step-by-step guide your organization can follow to put collaborative cost management in place and gain the maximum benefit from your cloud, download the Simple Guide to Collaborative Cost Management e-book.
