Financial Governance for Data Processing in the Cloud

Chapter 2. Big Data and the Cloud

Even though the cloud can enable companies to compete with their bigger competition in the big data space, it is not a journey without risk or pain.

Most businesses taking their journey into the cloud will follow a pattern similar to that outlined in the following sections.

Stage 1: Adoption

A typical cloud journey begins with some experimentation and small-scale tests of functionality.

The benefits of a cloud platform are usually immediately obvious, whether it be ease of use, scalability, flexibility, or simplicity.

There is usually a sense of excitement and a desire to escalate usage.

Stage 2: Expansion

Adoption is usually followed by expansion of services, often in a relatively unstructured way as different teams see different benefits that they can realize from the new technology.

The ease of creation and use of services also removes the need for structured change requests, meaning that the gatekeeper role offered by the IT department is often bypassed or loosened and old system controls are no longer applicable.

An inevitable outcome of this is that it is seen as a way of quickly getting things done without the constraints that used to be put in place by the IT department. Usually these constraints are seen as being unnecessary.

The expansion phase of many companies’ journey to the cloud often leads to chaotic, uncontrolled, siloed implementations operating in isolation from one another, albeit as implementations that might be delivering ...