Unlock efficiencies, reduce risks, and drive greater value from your cloud investments. Systal’s Cloud Infrastructure Leader Martin Hailstones discusses the importance of Cloud Governance and how Systal transformed our approach to cloud management leveraging SCOUT and Azure Lighthouse.
When Systal first embraced cloud technology, we were excited about the potential for innovation, scalability and flexibility. But as our cloud usage grew, so did the complexity of managing it. Like many organisations we were suddenly faced with escalating costs, security concerns, and a lack of visibility into how our resources were being used. We focused our attention on building robust cloud governance that followed the principles of the Well-Architected Framework and utilised tools like our FinOps solution (SCOUT) and centralised management system (Azure Lighthouse).
In this article, I will share how good cloud governance has transformed Systal’s approach to cloud management and how SCOUT and Azure Lighthouse have been instrumental in driving efficiency, optimising costs and ensuring our cloud operations align with our business goals.
The Importance of Good Cloud Governance
Let’s start with what cloud governance actually means. In a nutshell, cloud governance is about having the right processes, policies and tools in place to manage your cloud environment effectively. It ensures that your cloud resources are used efficiently, securely and in a way that aligns with your organisation’s objectives.
But why is this so important? Here’s what we discovered:
- Cost Control: Without proper governance, cloud costs can spiral out of control. It’s very easy to over-provision resources, forget about unused services, or miss opportunities for optimisation. Good governance helps you keep your spending in check.
- Security and Compliance: In the cloud, security is a shared responsibility. Governance ensures that security policies are consistently applied across your environment and that you remain compliant with regulatory requirements.
- Operational Efficiency: With cloud governance, you can streamline operations, reduce redundancy, and ensure that your cloud infrastructure is set up to support your business processes effectively.
- Risk Management: By establishing clear governance policies, you can mitigate risks related to data breaches, misconfigurations, and other vulnerabilities that could impact your organisation.
In short, good cloud governance is essential for making sure your cloud strategy delivers the value you expect, without unexpected costs or security gaps.
The Well-Architected Framework: A Blueprint for Success
When we set out to improve our cloud governance, we turned to the Well-Architected Framework, a set of best practices developed by cloud providers like AWS and Azure. The framework is built around five key pillars:
- Operational Excellence: Ensuring that your cloud operations are efficient, automated, and aligned with your business goals.
- Security: Protecting your data and systems through robust security practices and controls.
- Reliability: Designing your cloud infrastructure to be resilient and capable of recovering from failures.
- Performance Efficiency: Using cloud resources in the most efficient way possible, ensuring that your systems perform optimally.
- Cost Optimisation: Managing and optimising your cloud spending to ensure that you’re getting the best return on your investment.
By following these principles, we’ve been able to create a cloud environment that’s not only secure and reliable but also cost-effective and aligned with our strategic objectives.
Enter SCOUT: Our FinOps Tool for Cloud Efficiency
One of the biggest challenges we faced was managing our cloud costs. As our cloud environment grew, so did our spending and it wasn’t always clear where our money was going. That’s where SCOUT, our FinOps tool, came in.
SCOUT is designed to provide deep insights into your cloud spending, helping businesses identify inefficiencies and opportunities for cost savings. Here’s how it has helped Systal:
- Visibility into Cloud Spending: SCOUT provides a detailed breakdown of our cloud costs, showing us exactly where our money is going. Whether it’s compute, storage, or network traffic, SCOUT gives us the visibility we need to make informed decisions.
- Cost Optimisation Recommendations: SCOUT doesn’t just show us where we’re spending—it also highlights areas where we can optimise costs. For example, it might suggest resizing instances, consolidating storage, or moving workloads to lower-cost regions.
- Budgeting and Forecasting: With SCOUT, we can set budgets for different teams, projects, or business units, and track spending against those budgets in real-time. This helps us stay on top of our cloud costs and avoid surprises.
- Automated Alerts: SCOUT allows us to set up alerts for when spending exceeds a certain threshold or when a resource is underutilised. This proactive approach helps us catch issues before they become costly problems.
By using SCOUT, we’ve been able to significantly reduce our cloud spending while ensuring that our resources are used efficiently. It has become an essential part of our cloud governance strategy.
Azure Lighthouse: Centralised Management for Better Governance
While SCOUT has been crucial for managing our cloud costs, we also needed a way to manage our cloud resources across multiple business units and regions and utilised Azure Lighthouse for this.
Azure Lighthouse allows businesses to manage multiple Azure tenants from a single control plane. This has been a game-changer for us in terms of governance. Here’s how Azure Lighthouse has made our lives easier:
- Centralised Management: Instead of managing each Azure tenant separately, we can now manage them all from a single interface. This has reduced the complexity of our operations and ensured that our governance policies are consistently applied across the organisation.
- Improved Security: With Azure Lighthouse, we can enforce security policies across all our tenants, ensuring that every part of our organisation meets our security standards. This has greatly reduced our risk of security breaches and compliance issues.
- Operational Efficiency: By centralising management, Azure Lighthouse has streamlined our operations, making it easier to monitor, manage, and optimise our cloud resources. This has saved us time and reduced the administrative burden on our IT teams.
Together, SCOUT and Azure Lighthouse have provided us with a powerful toolkit for cloud governance. SCOUT helps us manage and optimise our cloud spending, while Azure Lighthouse gives us the centralised management capabilities we need to enforce our governance policies across the entire organisation.
The Power of Good Cloud Governance
Good cloud governance isn’t just about avoiding problems; it’s about driving value. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that good cloud governance is essential for maximising the value of our cloud investments. By following the Well-Architected Framework and leveraging tools like SCOUT and Azure Lighthouse, we’ve been able to control our cloud environment, optimise our costs, and ensure that our cloud operations are aligned with our business objectives.
Whether you’re just starting your cloud journey or looking to optimise an existing environment, I highly recommend focusing on cloud governance. Contact our experts for more information on how Systal can help you implement the strategy and tools needed to unlock efficiencies, reduce risks, and drive greater value from your cloud investments.
Martin Hailstones is an experienced cloud and infrastructure pre-sales consultant with over 20 years of experience in infrastructure management, end-user computing and, more recently, cloud adoption and migration. Passionate about guiding customers through their cloud journey, Martin helps design cloud solutions and develop roadmaps to help our customers meet their strategic business objectives. Martin is skilled in Microsoft 365, Azure, Nutanix, VMware, and Citrix.
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