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Governance in the Cloud: Strategies for Effective and Secure Management

Security, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness are three pillars that support quality operations in the IT space. The further the industry extends into the cloud, however, the more difficult it becomes for organizations to keep up with growing complexity and maintain those pillars. A strong governance strategy is necessary for effective management in the cloud, so enterprises need a straightforward way of enabling better governance.

Key Takeaways:

A cloud platform that guarantees accountability, transparency, and comprehensive monitoring can be the framework for effective governance. Many organizations are already operating in such an environment.
A unified hybrid multicloud environment, complete with automated scaling and insights, provides a complete view of a team’s efficiency profile.
Cost governance is particularly important to enforce as it keeps operations strictly in line with what the enterprise is financially capable of supporting.

Resilience is the goal for businesses that need to guarantee business continuity for themselves and their customers. Becoming resilient to failure is a matter of both security and management, making governance the deciding factor in just how resilient an organization can be.

Organizations are already enabling better governance

Governance is a concept that is practically synonymous with secure management in the cloud. Policies and performance are difficult to track in a distributed environment containing disparate clouds, so governance is a necessity for defining and implementing a framework that is consistent and functional across all locations.

Organizations are already enabling better governance through the use of comprehensive monitoring tools, accountability practices, and, perhaps most importantly, transparent cloud platforms. Business leaders recognize the need for visibility when it comes to security and the usefulness of alerting tools that inform teams when issues arise regarding network threats or expense thresholds.

The benefits of governance go beyond simply boosting resilience or saving money. Finding inefficiencies and creating new ways to keep things running smoothly will naturally result in optimized operations. Entire teams, or even the organizations as a whole, can find a streamlined approach that maximizes return on investment while also producing greater results for the consumer or user.

However, companies are still encountering challenges when it comes to cloud governance. A cloud environment is highly scalable, but this also means that operations can quickly exceed what the organization is capable of handling manually. This inadvertently leads to complications with compliance and infrastructure provisioning.

Addressing this need so that organizations can begin enabling better governance is the responsibility of cloud providers who aim to provide simple strategies for effective and secure management.

Implementing strategies for multicloud governance

In a time when operating multiple clouds is a necessity for avoiding vendor lock-in, but is still a complex technical challenge, many organizations are adopting hybrid solutions as a way to introduce some simplicity. Even in a hybrid multicloud setting, though, governance continues to be a difficult goal because of the siloed nature of a multicloud environment.

A true hybrid multicloud removes silos within a consistent cloud environment and makes expenses more straightforward to understand by allowing for seamless workload portability across clouds. As a unified platform, the ideal hybrid multicloud naturally facilitates the use of effective tools for streamlining management, fortifying security, and enabling better governance.

The Nutanix hybrid multicloud provides a window into multicloud management and governance with Nutanix Prism. Seamless control over clouds is a key feature of Prism, providing automation, intelligent scaling, and AI-driven insights all visible in one comprehensive view.

One view

Automatic, scale, secure

AI-driven insights

With Prism Central, management becomes more defined and every bit as granular as IT leaders might want. Logically grouping infrastructure resources and managing role-based access controls becomes simple, ensuring governance on a scale that meets the needs and goals of the individual organization.

Improving outcomes through cost governance

Expenses can get out of control with cloud subscriptions and recurring service fees, many of which are subtle and easy to forget until they break the bank. In an article for Forbes, Finout CEO Roi Ravhon said, “...There is a growing need for a single FinOps tool that can handle all aspects of cost tracking and optimization. Using multiple tools for different purposes creates inefficiencies and increases the risk of oversight.”

Ravhon’s insight clearly illustrates a need for enabling better governance in general, but cost governance in particular. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) expands upon the management capabilities that operators already have in the Nutanix environment, bringing intelligent operations to the next level and streamlining deployment via self-service options.

NCM Cost Governance drives financial accountability with features including automated resource sizing as well as cloud metering and chargeback. Using NCM for multicloud management can save businesses up to 35% or more in cloud costs due to seamless right-sizing and optimization.

Visibility

Optimization

Control

Cost governance is an especially crucial aspect of effective cloud management because it keeps operations strictly in line with what the enterprise is financially capable of supporting. This provides teams with the wiggle room they need to also enforce secure and efficient governance in other areas of development and production.

Enabling better governance with Nutanix

Governance is not a new concept by any means, even in the cloud, but new innovations call for future-proof solutions that can keep up with the latest strategies and improve outcomes in a cloud-native world. That is why Nutanix is the place for governance in the cloud.

Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) delivers simplicity, agility, and unification to cloud operations. These are the traits necessary for facilitating a governance strategy that will truly accelerate time-sensitive efficiencies and keep overhead costs low.

Adopting a consistent hybrid multicloud operating model on a platform built for resilience and simplified management is the quick, no-shortcut way of enabling better governance. Contact us today to discuss how Nutanix can accelerate your cloud governance strategy.

Learn more about other cost-saving methods and automation use cases that further facilitate governance in the cloud.

“The Nutanix “how-to” info blog series is intended to educate and inform Nutanix users and anyone looking to expand their knowledge of cloud infrastructure and related topics. This series focuses on key topics, issues, and technologies around enterprise cloud, cloud security, infrastructure migration, virtualization, Kubernetes, etc. For information on specific Nutanix products and features, visit here.”