In 2021, Cloud Governance Becomes Imperative as Adoption Soars

… may have access to it in the cloud.

SR: MontyCloud approaches cloud governance as a critical building-block practice that helps customers achieve their digital transformation goals. While governance goals may be viewed as business processes that are overheads, we believe well-governed cloud environments drive more innovation, deliver better ROI for the business and help control total cost of cloud operations. … We take an “automation first” approach, but without having to deploying agents, or write and maintain code.

CF: Which aspects of cloud governance will be most critical for MSPs, VARs, integrators and other channel partners to ensure on customers’ behalf in 2021, and why?

KO: It is critical that channel partners help their customers better understand the cloud provider’s shared responsibility security model. The cloud providers have done a lot of work to secure their infrastructure and services, and as a result, analyst firms are saying that over 95% of cloud security breaches in 2021 will be the user’s fault. Channel partners have an opportunity to help educate customers on their responsibilities as part of the shared security model, to help properly define security policies, and to provide tooling and/or managed services to monitor and enforce those policies.

Fortanix’s David Greene

DG: Customers accelerated their move to applications and data to the cloud. But their governance got left behind, and now they’re really exposed. They know they need to catch up, but may not know how to. Partners are in a great position to fill the gap.

SR: The key aspects of cloud governance that are important to MSPs, VARs and integrators are consistency in driving consumption, cost efficiency, access controls and self-service enablement with centrally enforced guardrails. Innovation can only be accelerated, and costs controlled, when cloud governance is automated without being a burden on the end user or the enforcement teams.

CF: What cloud governance trends do you see MSPs, VARs, integrators and other channel partners seriously embracing on behalf of customers in 2021, and why?

KO: Multicloud deployments are here to stay for a variety of reasons, including cost controls and reducing single-vendor dependencies. As a result, we see partners embracing multicloud governance tools in an effort to standardize and simplify cloud policy enforcement.

DG: For most customers, “move to the cloud” will mean a complex, multicloud environment that is constantly changing. No one is using just one cloud. Governance needs to be correspondingly flexible and comprehensive.

MontyCloud’s Sabrinath Rao

SR: Driving down total cost of cloud operations is a key area that partners are seriously embracing on behalf of customers. As customers wind down their on-premises IT environments in favor of the public cloud, many case studies are emerging on unbridled cloud costs and bill shocks. The majority of the tools are focused on parsing bills at a granular resource level, and resource level optimizations. Effective cost management is a combination of granular understanding at the application level and automation.

Another area that partners can play an important role is in governance, compliance and security management. With the cloud, IT personnel have to manage vast API surfaces, newer constructs such as account/region boundaries, as well as security and governance constructs.

Navigating effectively requires experts and automation tools. Partners play an important role in bridging the emerging skills gaps, as both cloud vendors and customers compete for sparse, cloud-savvy people resources.

CF: Which cloud governance trends or best practices are you afraid channel partners are likely to ignore or under-address, and why?

KO: Understanding who has access to critical resources in the cloud is one of those areas of complexity that is really easy to underestimate. Identity and access control on-prem is fairly well understood, and as a result, it is easy for IT teams to think that …