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.
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:
- 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
- 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
- Ability to scale the environment efficiently
- Supports innovation, ongoing evolution and growth of the business
- Increased complexity and cost the longer you wait to implement governance
- Minimise operational and reputational risks from a security perspective
- Ability to track cost more granularly for each service or department