60 likes | 158 Views
Self-Service Financial Control and Organizational Governance in Cloud Chunqiang Tang, Chang-shing Perng, Salman Baset IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. What Cloud Brings to Us?. Key features of cloud On-demand self-service Auto-scaling Advantages: improve productivity and agility
E N D
Self-Service Financial Control and Organizational Governance in CloudChunqiang Tang, Chang-shing Perng, Salman BasetIBM T.J. Watson Research Center
What Cloud Brings to Us? • Key features of cloud • On-demand self-service • Auto-scaling • Advantages: improve productivity and agility • Risk: circumvent traditional business process around IT financial control and organizational governance
Examples of Risks in Using Cloud without Governance • Example 1: A student over-spends his professor’s credit card on Cloud resources. • Example 2: A large enterprise continuously adjusts its IT budget allocation and organization structure, making it hard for frontline engineers to balance spending. • Example 3: Due to a bug in a Cloud application’s autoscaling controller, it mistakenly creates 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) instantaneously. • Example 4: An employee provisions in the Cloud a public facing VM using the company’s domain name, but it exposes inappropriate Web contents, due to either mistake or abuse.
Root Cause of the Governance Problems Cloud lives in fairyland • Cloud is totally disconnected from the governance structure and process in the real world • No reflection of the hierarchical structure of an organization • No reflection of the complex budget flow in an organization Corporate Structure Example: a school’s budget flow
Solution Overview for the Governance Problems (1/2) • Separation of governance mechanism and policy • Cloud provider builds the mechanism for governance • Cloud user defines the governance policy through self-service • Organizational governance solution • Hierarchical account structure • User self-service to grow or change the hierarchy • Parent account has authority over child account
Solution Overview for the Governance Problems (2/2) Financial control solution • User self-service to create, divide, and pass “credit tokens” to represent budget flows • A credit token comes with user-defined rules, and the cloud provider enforces the rules • E.g., hourly spending < $100 AND monthly spending < $1000 • Users can define monitoring rules to trigger alert on spending