Cloud Cloud Collection: Building a directory of cloud-based service providers

As technicians, we all know that businesses are increasing the use of cloud computing. More and more IT experts are now aware that more cloudy applications will appear outside the Enterprise http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/14162.html ">it architecture." For example, a personal business unit can work directly with a third cloud provider, without directly interfering with it, to achieve this customer relationship.

As a result, a single enterprise is most likely to occur, and for different purposes, a variety of relationships are established with different cloud service providers. These service providers may be busy accomplishing all of their functions, from infrastructure to service (IaaS) It consumption (for example, disaster recovery, on-demand capacity improvement, virtual test platform, and so on), to Application support Services (PaaS), enterprise in-house developers can deploy application and component development to externally hosted applications (SaaS) To directly implement business needs support for different business units.

From the business unit's point of view, there may be some expected advantages, such as the immediacy of service delivery, but from a technical governance perspective, it can lead to problems. One of the challenges is that individual business units rarely collaborate with each other to confirm that they are buying similar services from the same provider. From a security and compliance perspective, the challenge of ensuring that every vendor is properly reviewed and managed is related to sensitive data and regulatory data that can only be sent to the enterprise and approved in a security-controlled manner.

Service Catalog Value

While some fully-equipped companies are preparing to start managing a variety of cloud service providers used by business, most companies do not. Since many of these relationships involve storage regulations or sensitive information, or from a business continuity perspective, data is critical to the business and without proper governance of these relationships can lead to potential security and regulatory consequences. In addition, because these relationships may occur outside it (multiple sources), there is a logical load type, because these relationships may not be well suited to the previous governance model.

Building a directory around service provider relationships can help both manage potential risks better and lay the groundwork for further strategic cloud application planning. First and foremost, this directory helps organizations identify and document the different service providers that are being used. This is helpful because the services themselves are not static and are not about how they are used in the enterprise. Remember that service providers, like organizations, constantly change the services they provide, they may upgrade security controls, cause downtime, or fall victim to a violation, or an organization decides to extend the scope of the provider used. In order to manage these, there is a need for core centralized oversight.

A directory of structured service provider relationships means a lot of things. can assist the enterprise to determine the specific owner of each relationship, for example, who signed the service to be responsible for this use case. Also help maintain consistency with service provider product updates and assist with potential consolidation implementations in the local area. For example, companies can use service providers to deploy more, which should be negotiated, or compare the effects of different products. In short, tracking cloud service provider relationships has the same value for businesses as tracking third-party relationships.

Building a detailed Catalog

Before putting these structured catalogs together, it is an additional challenge to identify the full range of cloud service use cases in large enterprises. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to find a list of those that maintain these historical conventions and to compile a list of current vendor relationships. However, this may only produce a subdirectory of the entire network. Because many cloud service providers are easy to use for any customer, their products can only be paid for by credit card transactions, which is difficult to track. Some are also for some use cases free.

The best way to implement the cloud services discovery process is to look up all the different business, technical, and support teams within the enterprise and determine what use cases they use, including what services are being used, and how to use them.

For example, if business impact analysis practices for enterprise Sustainable development Planning (BCP) are regularly managed, collecting use cases for cloud services can also help automate this process and reduce problems. Alternatively, asking the target question in the application risk review will also help you review the new plan and business process.

When collecting data from individuals, remember that many users have no concept of what "cloud" is. For example, if you ask a question, "What cloud service do you use?" "They may not understand that tools like Salesforce are cloud services, so they don't provide the data you seek. Instead, ask a more appropriate question, "like which company managed and managed XYZ services?" "If they don't know the answer, at least you know the direction of the next step."

Line

Putting the cloud service provider catalog together in the enterprise is a productive practice that allows managers to assess the specific use case types and the regulatory environment that objects may require compliance, in contrast to the relationships they are reviewing and approving. In addition, a reliable directory is particularly useful in the investigation in the prior clearance.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)