What is cloud governance?
Cloud governance entails the policies, processes, and controls an organization puts in place to ensure the effective and secure management of its cloud resources and services. All elements are agreed upon by stakeholders based on previous security history and risk assessment of its cloud environment.
Cloud governance involves:
Optimizing cloud usage
Aligning the allocation of cloud resources with business objectives
Managing potential cloud security risks
Enhancing security and cost efficiency
Assigning cloud monitoring and threat prevention responsibilities
Defining incident response strategies
A good cloud governance framework entails regular audits, policy enforcement, monitoring, and reporting.
Importance of Cloud Governance in Cloud Computing
While cloud computing offers several operational pros, including automation, cost-effectiveness, and scalability, it also introduces some challenges due to its dynamic and complex nature.
For one, cloud computing involves storing sensitive data and applications on third-party servers, which raises data privacy and regulatory compliance concerns. There are also challenges related to resource usage and allocation, which often lead to unexpected spending.
Cloud governance addresses these and several other complexities by offering the following benefits:
Cost Control: Manual tracking of cloud usage with spreadsheets often leads to budget overruns. Cloud governance automates budgeting, cost allocation, and resource scheduling, ensuring cost efficiency and preventing overspending.
Security Assurance: Cloud governance enforces role-based access controls to minimize unauthorized deployments and shadow IT. Continuous monitoring detects threats and evaluates security strategies, ensuring ongoing protection.
Regulatory Compliance: Cloud governance enforces encryption, data retention, and access controls to comply with standards like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and NIST, simplifying compliance audits.
Improved Visibility and Efficiency: Enhanced visibility into performance and resource usage enables informed decision-making, resource optimization, and faster resolution of performance bottlenecks.
Independence and Control: Cloud governance prevents vendor lock-in by proactively evaluating providers and ensuring compatibility for platform-to-platform migration.
Deployment Acceleration: By integrating DevOps practices and tools like Kubernetes, cloud governance streamlines deployment, reduces friction, and accelerates software delivery cycles.
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What is a cloud governance framework? Key components
A cloud governance strategy begins with a governance framework made up of well-defined policies. These policies balance employee roles/responsibilities with the need for controlling access to cloud infrastructure and protecting data.
While each governance framework contains certain generic components, covered below, stakeholders must adapt them to their enterprise’s specific use case.
Cloud compliance and risk management
Cloud governance facilitates data retention and deletion, backups, access control, and other data protection measures; this ensures compliance with regulations and industry-specific standards, such as PCI-DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, CIS, and NIST.
Cloud governance also involves balancing cloud control with risk and implementing risk management techniques, e.g., risk avoidance, risk mitigation, and risk transfer for continued cloud protection.
Cloud data management
Huge chunks of sensitive data are increasingly stored in the cloud, requiring proper cloud governance. In 2025, cloud storage is expected to exceed 200 zettabytes, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
To protect this data and ensure its continued availability, cloud governance helps implement:
Data classification strategies
Data retention and disaster recovery
Data masking
Identity and access management (IAM)
Data encryption
Cloud financial management
The more resources used, the higher the cost. Cloud governance helps you manage and optimize this expenditure by eliminating idle resources. It implements techniques like:
Rightsizing instances to match workload requirements
Utilizing spot instances for cost-effective computing
Outsourcing necessary services to managed service providers (MSPs)
Leveraging autoscaling to dynamically adjust resources based on demand
By utilizing cost management tools provided by cloud providers or third-party services, you can track and control cloud costs to achieve efficiencies and boost your bottom line.
Cloud operations management
To manage the vast workload in the cloud and streamline operations, organizations must adopt cloud governance automation and orchestration techniques. The top among these are infrastructure as code (IaC) and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
IaC enables consistent and scalable cloud resource management and deployment using code. CI/CD pipelines automate the software development lifecycle, making it faster and more reliable.
Cloud operations management also includes leveraging monitoring tools, alerting mechanisms, log management, and incident response strategies for operational excellence and swift troubleshooting.
How to build an effective cloud governance framework
A strong cloud governance framework helps keep your cloud environment secure, organized, and cost-effective. Follow these five steps to set up a solid foundation.
Define the scope of governance: Identify key areas that require governance, such as security, compliance, cost management, and operational control. Determine which teams, applications, and cloud environments fall under its scope to ensure policies address the right challenges without unnecessary complexity.
Create governance policies and standards: Develop clear policies for access control, data security, resource provisioning, and spending limits based on industry regulations and business requirements. Standardize naming conventions, tagging structures, and configuration settings to ensure consistency across cloud environments.
Assign ownership: Define who is responsible for enforcing governance policies across security, cost monitoring, compliance, and operations. Assigning clear roles prevents oversight and ensures governance tasks are handled efficiently.
Select governance enforcement tools: Implement cloud-native tools like AWS Organizations, Azure Policy, and Google Cloud Policy Engine to apply policies across environments. Use IAM to regulate permissions and ensure that only authorized users can make changes.
Define enforcement and escalation procedures: Establish clear processes for handling policy violations, such as triggering alerts, restricting access, or applying corrective actions. Governance should include predefined escalation paths and structured reporting to maintain accountability across teams.
Cloud governance models for managing cloud services
Government and industry experts have established several models that set standards for how organizations work in the cloud. A cloud governance model establishes policies, procedures, and controls to guarantee compliance, security, and effective management of cloud services.
| Governance Model | Description |
|---|---|
| COBIT | COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies) is a governance framework developed by ISACA that helps organizations establish policies, implement controls, and ensure regulatory compliance. The latest version, COBIT 2019, introduces design factors and maturity models, offering a governance workflow toolkit and detailing 40 processes for effective cloud governance.COBIT also provides various governance and compliance certifications, including the COBIT Bridge Certification and exams for the COBIT 2019 Foundation and Design & Implementation, as well as NIST compliance with COBIT 2019. |
ITIL | ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) provides guidelines for managing IT services, ensuring they align with business objectives and maintain high service quality. ITIL 4 introduces best practices for cloud governance, covering strategy, policy implementation, and continuous improvement.Organizations and professionals can obtain ITIL certifications to validate compliance and expertise. |
| ISO/IEC 38500 & ISO/IEC 27017 | Developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), these frameworks guide IT governance and cloud security best practices. ISO/IEC 38500 ensures IT strategies align with business goals, while ISO/IEC 27017 provides security controls for cloud service providers and customers. Organizations can earn ISO certifications to demonstrate governance maturity and enhance customer trust. |
Best practices for a holistic cloud governance strategy
These best practices create a holistic strategy that strengthens security, ensures compliance, controls costs, and improves operational efficiency across your cloud environment.
1. Implement centralized monitoring
Gaining end-to-end visibility into your cloud resources is key to understanding what is going on in your cloud environment. You can achieve full visibility with centralized monitoring tools that provide:
Interactive monitoring dashboards
Data correlation
Activity log and security metrics collection
Automated severity-based alerting capabilities
2. Automate policy enforcement
Reduce manual intervention by using automation tools such as CI/CD pipelines, IaC, and configuration management frameworks. Automation helps enforce security policies, prevent misconfigurations, and streamline governance workflows.
3. Cultivate a culture of cloud accountability
Establish mechanisms to track and enforce cloud usage policies through access control monitoring, user provisioning processes, and IAM solutions. Regularly review permissions and usage patterns to prevent unnecessary risk.
4. Train and educate employees
Consistently train and educate employees to expand their knowledge (and skills) related to cloud governance. This helps employees understand and follow best practices, security protocols, and compliance requirements when working with cloud resources.
5. Regularly review cloud governance policies
As cloud environments evolve, update policies to address new compliance regulations, emerging threats, and changes in cloud usage. Regular governance audits help refine policies, remove outdated practices, and identify potential security or operational gaps. Reviewing policies also helps mitigate risks associated with cloud adoption, such as service disruptions, vendor lock-in, and dependency on specific cloud providers.
6. Establish incident response and recovery plans
Prepare for security threats with predefined escalation paths, incident detection workflows, and disaster recovery strategies. Test response plans regularly and maintain secure backups to minimize downtime.
7. Limit external exposure
Implement security measures such as virtual private clouds (VPCs), firewalls, and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) to limit exposure to the external environment. This protects your cloud infrastructure and data from being compromised, including unauthorized access and data breaches.
Implement security measures such as virtual private clouds (VPCs), firewalls, and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) to limit exposure to the external environment. This protects your cloud infrastructure and data from being compromised, including unauthorized access and data breaches.
Strengthen your cloud environment with Wiz
Strong cloud governance helps you securely manage resources, maintain compliance, and keep your cloud strategy aligned with business goals. The right tools make it easier to stay in control as your cloud environment grows. That’s where Wiz comes in—giving you the visibility and automation to enforce governance without the hassle.
Wiz is a comprehensive security solution that takes over the security role, letting you focus on production without compromising security. With Wiz, you gain a clear understanding of your cloud environment, allowing you to assess and ensure regulatory compliance, identify potential vulnerabilities, and enhance your overall security posture.
To see firsthand how Wiz can boost your organization’s cloud governance efforts, schedule a demo with us today.
