Identify IT Governance Issues

Chapter 15, “Governing the Cloud,” examines the IT governance process and how the use of the cloud will extend the governance requirements for the IT staff. Before you migrate an application to the cloud, consider the following governance requirements:

• Identify how the cloud solution aligns with the business strategy.

• Identify and define the internal and external controls the company will need within the application, and at what control points, in order to validate that the application is performing correctly and is free from possible external modification.

• Describe risks the IT staff is trying to mitigate and ways the cloud may help them to do so.

• Describe who within the organization must have access to data within the cloud and how.

• Discover who within the cloud-solution provider’s organization will have access to data and how.

• Determine how the cloud provider logs errors and system events and how those logs are made available to you.

• Determine how and when the cloud provider performs system updates and patches.

• Discover which performance-monitoring tools the cloud provider makes available for your use.