Cloud Security Governance Deployment Framework

Issues in Cloud Governance

Though the clouds make it easier for the organisation to develop their systems and deploy assets, though it seems to promote innovation, it can cause issues like the following.

• Due to poor integration between the cloud systems.
• Due to duplication of data.
• Due to a lack of alignment between the cloud systems.
• Due to security issues.

Importance of Cloud Governance

There are a lot of benefits of using cloud governance. The organisation can avoid many different issues by implementing cloud governance.

These are as follows.

1. Cloud governance improves the security and privacy risks of an organisation. These security and privacy issues may arrive from the unwanted installation or downloads of the software or accessing the restricted sites by the users. It ensures the appropriate security of the data no matter where the data exist or the critical systems are deployed.
    
2. Cloud governance improves cloud resource management by breaking down the cloud systems into individual accounts. It improves cost control and visibility and limits security issues' business impact.
    
3. If any organisation does not know where the data and systems are deployed, the risk of security breaches and the cost of cloud systems significantly increases. 
   The employees of any organisation nowadays tend to turn on to shadow IT systems while not getting a rapid response from the traditional IT services.
   Cloud governance allows the employees to conveniently request cloud resources and access the cloud systems within the organisation’s compliance and budget constraints. Thus this reduces the use of shadow IT systems.
    
4. Organisations generally use manual procedures(like spreadsheets) to track the cloud accounts, costs and other compliance issues. This is inefficient, risky and error-prone and not manageable at a large scale.
   The cloud governance solution enables organisations to define some policies in such cases. Applying those policies in the entire cloud infrastructure centralizes the control over access and costs, raises alerts and makes it easier to respond to violations. It reduces the time, effort, cost and risks of non-compliant activities.

Principles of Cloud Governance Model

The cloud governance practices help organisations plan and control various aspects of their cloud usage. The following principles can be considered a good starting point for building your cloud governance model.

1. Compliance with policies and standards: The cloud governance model must comply with your organisation's regulation and compliance standards.
    
2. Alignment with business objectives: For an origination, cloud security should be an integral part and support the business goals.
    
3. Collaboration: For an organisation, there should be a clear agreement between the owners and the users of cloud infrastructure to make appropriate and mutually beneficial use of the cloud resources.
    
4. Change management: All the cloud changes must be implemented consistently.
    
5. Dynamic response: Cloud governance should dynamically respond to the event in the cloud environment.

Designing and Implementing a Cloud Governance  Framework

The components of the cloud governance framework are discussed below:

Cloud Security and Compliance Management

Cloud governance includes the following security topics:

• risk assessment
• Data encryption and key management 
• Application management
• Identity and access management
• Contingency planning
   

Cloud governance takes the responsibility to ensure that the organisation’s security and compliance requirements are enforced in the cloud environment. It should build on existing governance policies and frameworks, extending to the cloud and translating them to the cloud environment. 

Cloud Financial Management

We know that the cloud service providers claim that cloud services make more financial sense than managing your own infrastructure. The claim is somehow true if you effectively use and control your cloud costs with diligent policies and reporting.

In many organisations, cloud costs become much higher than expected if the cloud costs are not duly managed. 

There are mainly three elements of cloud financial management. These are as follows:

• Financial management policies: The financial management policies provide a framework for the organisation to plan to use the cloud services. These policies help determine in which cases the managed services should be used to reduce the overall operating cost or specify a cost management checklist to be followed before deploying a new service to the public cloud.
   
• Cost reporting: The cost reporting policies must be there for an organisation to stay alert about the cost of the cloud environment. Your cloud environment may exceed most of your budget just a few days into the month. In that cases, an alert or report gives you the time to adjust your infrastructure and service use. Most of the time, the cloud providers provide cost reporting tools. You can also use any third-party services based on your needs.
   
• Budgets:  The cloud service is often distributed across multiple services for an organisation. So for calculating the total cost, a business might need to search across the various region, accounts and cloud services.
  
  In that case, the organisation should develop a plan to gather information and budget.

Cloud Operation Management

Cloud operation management focuses on defining the processes and how cloud resources deliver services.

The things that should be included in the process are shown below:

• A clear definition of the rules and processes.
• Service-level agreements(SLAs) to allocate resources.
• Monitor the state of services to make sure that SLAs are met.
• Process and required checks before deploying code to various environments, mainly in production environments.
• Access control requirements.
   

A well-defined and strong cloud operation management practice is one of the best ways to prevent shadow IT. 

Cloud Data Management

As the data expands day by day, the difficulty of effectively managing the data also increases.  The cloud makes it easier to collect, store and analyze a lot of data. But still, managing a huge amount of data is quite challenging. So there must be some cloud governance strategy that should specify how to manage your organisation's full data lifecycle.

These are as follows:

• In an organisation, all data is not equally valuable or needs comparable levels of security. That’s why the organisation should build a data classification scheme and set policies for each class of data based on different sensitivity levels.
   
• All the data must be encrypted in transit and at rest.
   
• Appropriate access control for each class of data must be ensured.
   
• When the data is used for development, testing or training, the organisation should use the data masking to reduce the risk of sensitive data.
   
• The organisation should build a tiering strategy to move data from high-cost storage systems to low-cost archival systems.
   
• Manual data lifecycle management is inefficient for high scale data, and it is prone to errors, so the organisation must ensure that the data lifecycle management is automated.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is cloud governance?

Cloud governance is the set of principles and policies that guide companies that run services on the cloud.

Why is cloud security governance needed?

Cloud security governance is needed for some typical security challenges like data breaches, system vulnerabilities, credential and access management etc.

What are the six layers of cloud services?

The six layers in the cloud services are Clients, Services, Application, Platform, Storage and Infrastructure.

What are the cloud service models?

The three cloud service models are Software as a Service(SaaS), Platform as a Service(PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS).

Conclusion

In this article, we have extensively discussed the Cloud Security Governance Deployment Framework.

We started with the basic introduction, then we discussed,

• Cloud governance
• Different Issues in Cloud Governance
• Importance of Cloud Governance
• Principles of Cloud Governance
• Finally, we showed how to design and implement the different components i.e.
  • Cloud Security and Compliance
  • Cloud Financial
  • Cloud Operation
  • Cloud Data
     

We hope that this blog has helped you enhance your knowledge regarding Cloud Security Governance Deployment Framework and if you would like to learn more, check out our articles on Introduction to Cloud Computing, Iaas vs Paas vs Saas, Cloud Computing Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Management in Cloud Computing. Do upvote our blog to help other ninjas grow.

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