Project Management

Looking at IT Governance Through the Clouds

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

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With the advent of the Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) space, new issues related to IT Governance are emerging for both the provider and customer. These governance issues run deep as they impact the development practices, application architecture, infrastructure, deployment, utilization, control and continuity management aspects of the IT governance spectrum. 

For the majority of organizations, the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) provides the answer to most of the issues between provider and customer.  However, no number of SLAs can satisfy the customer organization’s responsibility to exercise due diligence in satisfying itself and its auditors that core business functions run via a Cloud Computing environment are properly managed, controlled, resilient to disruptions, safe from disasters, safe from theft and misuse and more.  Once the information asset is no longer under the control of the enterprise, things get rather dicey. 

While traditional environments are subject to the same governance requirements as Cloud Computing, the inherent loss of control of data and the difficulty in identifying and  troubleshooting transaction failures raises a whole new set of issues.  The risk factors, while statistically may seem lower than traditional environments, are in fact much greater.  Basically, when an …

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