A frequent question we get asked is how to articulate a business case for Azure Governance in an existing environment? Why spend the time, money and effort doing this when systems are already operational?

It’s important to understand what we mean by Azure and Azure Governance. I like Wikipedia’s description of Azure – Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems. In short, Azure is Microsoft’s cloud.

Azure Governance can be described simply as mechanisms and processes to maintain control over your applications and resources in Azure.

The business case for Azure Governance

So how do you create a business case around Azure Governance? We’ve put together a few high-level points below that should get you started:

  1. Reduce costs
    • Understand who is using what and why
    • Take advantage of reduced pricing – Develop/Test systems, Reserved Instances for highly utilized wirtual machine’s
    • Use automation to reduce number of systems running when not required
  2. Reduce complexity of supporting the environment
    • Reduce complexity of services by following best practice
    • Reduce number of vendors (single Cloud provider)
    • Standardisation of configuration and deployment
  3. Ability to scale the environment efficiently
    • Supports innovation, ongoing evolution and growth of the business
  4. Increased complexity and cost the longer you wait to implement governance
  5. Minimise operational and reputational risks from a security perspective
  6. Ability to track cost more granularly for each service or department

Remember you pay for what you consume in any cloud computing environment. If you don’t have a handle on your consumption, you can and will quickly consume more than you budgeted for. Without governance, I would argue that it is impossible to successfully operate highly available systems, in turn impacting revenue and/or reputation. Governance can also help ensure environments meet company and legal compliance and security rules.

Hopefully you found this overview informative. However, there is much more to discuss when it comes to Azure Governance. If you’re interested to learn more, please reach out to us at hello@walkerscott.co.