Financial Governance for Data Processing in the Cloud

Chapter 5. Stage 2: Control

The ethos of cloud platforms is to make everything frictionless, available, and easy to use, particularly programmatically.

The entire system is designed to free developers and Ops people from the constraints of old-world datacenter and on-premises systems: the world of purchase orders, change-control forms, work schedules, and everything else that restricts the efficient and reactive creation of new infrastructure and functionality. The cloud is designed to be an on-demand system with zero resistance to creation and usage of services.

This is one of the reasons why the cloud services are game changers in the industry. They have freed companies from the constraints of traditional infrastructure management and allowed them to be much more dynamic and reactive. Any CFO in control of finances for a cloud-centric company will tell you that this freedom is nice in theory but in practice some control is needed.

Although this is a brave new world for many reasons, it creates a nightmare for financial governance. New infrastructure can be created at will with no human intervention; on-demand, usage-based systems can be integrated into applications to be called on an ad hoc basis. In short, costs cannot be easily controlled, traced, or predicted.

This second stage in the financial governance life cycle—control—at a high level looks to control or put limits on who (whether human, virtual service, or other system) can do what within the platform.

There are two ...