Expert Blog: AWS Governance at Scale: ‘CIOs, Automate Your Cloud’

Ajay Gupta - Jamcraker Ajay Gupta, Director of Business Development & Pre-Sales for Jamcracker

AWS Governance at Scale can help companies establish centrally managed budgets for cloud resources, oversight of cloud implementations, and the dashboard of the company’s cloud health.

By Ajay Gupta, Jamcracker, Inc.

Cloud adoption and cloud first strategies have created significant governance issues for enterprise CIOs. Today it’s becoming a nightmare for them to manage cloud governance issues.

Broadly, impacted enterprises can be classified into two categories:

Enterprises trying to manage by using Traditional IT methods
Enterprises trying to manage by using multiple tools

Enterprises using AWS and falling into any of these categories are not able to set their house in order. Solutions and processes they might be using are either fragmented or not built for on-demand IT. First category enterprises are using traditional IT management processes that work in silos and involve manual, human-dependent processes - since it lacks workflow automation.

To manage visibility and spend, IT ends up creating multiple AWS accounts for departments and projects but with a lack of centralized administration which leads to cloud sprawl and often results in budgets overrun. The second category as stated does not provide to stitch complete GRC into a single glass of pane and hence can be fragmented. Most CIOs will have a prevailing thought to address this with the help of a single tool but are stuck between is ‘build versus buy’.

If you read what AWS has to say about Governance at Scale, check the following:

Governance at Scale can help companies establish centrally managed budgets for cloud resources, oversight of cloud implementations, and the dashboard of the company’s cloud health. Cloud health is based on near real-time compliance with governance policies and enforcement mechanisms. To enable this, the policies and mechanisms are separated into three governance at scale focal points:

Account Management - Automate account provisioning and maintain good security when hundreds of users and business units are requesting cloud-based resources.
Budget & Cost Management - Enforce and monitoring budgets across many accounts, workloads, and users.
Security & Compliance Automation - Manage security, risk, and compliance at a scale and pace to ensure the organization maintains compliance while minimizing the impact on the business.

Required is a single tool able to help enterprises monitor and control costs, accounts, and compliance standards associated with operating large enterprises on AWS.

Let’s have a look at a use case. Enterprise IT has the following to manage while consuming AWS.

Centralized budget for AWS usage for a year. And the budget allocations and tracking should happen across departments and projects.
Based on department and types of users defining policies of who can provision what? Enforcing Enterprise IT security policies on provisioned AWS resources.
A centralized access and visibility at every layer in the organization hierarchy about their spend, budgets, and resources.

Jamcracker Cloud Management Platform provides all features for Enterprise IT to align Governance at scale. Key features include:

Account Management – Streamlining multiple account creation process automatically or map existing parent and linked accounts to respective departments. Policy automation to define roles and access. RBAC enabled access of AWS console via SSO from the Jamcracker platform. Automated Workflow makes the entire process seamless from account provisioning via APIs to the importing AWS templates and creates centralized as well as department-specific AWS catalog. This would bring acceleration to developers and managers for provisioning and tracking.
Budgeting & Cost Management – Budget planning and enforcement, that is in a nutshell what Jamcracker helps Enterprise IT to achieve with their AWS consumption. IT can define AWS consumption budgets at the department level and track them centrally. Every department admin can further define and track budgets for projects. Developers can tag resources and can focus on their workloads. To do cost management automated workflows and dashboards are available. On one hand, workflow helps to enforce consumption under budgets and also gives the flexibility to provide approval for exceptions. Other hand dashboards give an insight into cost consumption for the department as well as central IT. Various recommendation dashboard suggesting optimizing workloads, adopting on-demand vs reserved instances, analyzing saving plans based on agreements enterprises signed with AWS.
Security & Compliance Automation – Supports automation to enforce security and compliance to achieve organizational GRC policies.

About Jamcracker Inc.

Jamcracker, a Gartner Cool Vendor Company, is a cloud services management and cloud governance solutions company, with more than a decade of experience providing industry leading software and services. The Jamcracker Platform powers cloud services provisioning, cloud governance, spend management, and operations for enterprise and government organizations, telecom service providers, managed services providers, systems integrator, distributors, value added resellers and technology providers.

Jamcracker is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with offices and channel partners in Latin America, UK, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Korea and India. For more information, visit https://www.jamcracker.com

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