Financial Governance for Data Processing in the Cloud

Chapter 6. Stage 3: Optimize

Although traceability and predictability are important elements in financial governance policies, cost control and cost reduction are typically the focus of any financial governance exercise.

Having fully understood the nature of your platform and implemented sufficient controls, the next step is to see how you can take advantage of the cloud platform in order to optimize your usage and therefore minimize cost without affecting the quality of service or the traceability and predictability put in place.

As discussed earlier, the fluidity and ease of control of cloud platforms can cause real difficulties for maintaining financial governance. However, when used correctly, you can use these same elements as a tool of cost reduction.

Cloud platforms are designed for automation, to be dynamically created and destroyed on demand, and careful use of these facilities can result in a highly optimized system that is extremely cost effective while always meeting the requirements of the business.

Optimizing for Performance

Part of the optimization process is to try to ensure optimal performance. However, when we optimize for performance, it is important to remember that we are optimizing not only the speed of query execution, but also the timeliness of the execution. One of the costliest resources to the business is data scientist time; this can often be a hidden cost of running a data-processing platform. So, the least amount of waiting these people must do, ...