Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

CHAPTER 8
Bringing Governance
to the Clouds
Chapter 8
How can you govern a country that
has 246 varieties of cheese
—Charles De Gaulle (1890–1970)
It is Tuesday morning. You just got a page from the vice
president of sales that the customer relationship management
(CRM) system is down—again. You look into the
issue and find that your cloud computing provider has
altered a database update service, which made your customer
information access processes fail, which stopped
the CRM system. You had no idea the service was going
to change and no idea how the change in that service
would affect the other enterprise systems. In other words,
you lack governance, or the ability to control changes to
services and the usage of services.
Cloud computing needs governance in order to be
successful. If you think about it, at the end state of our architecture
we have thousands of services and data elements
under management, and we must control how
they are accessed, added, deleted, and altered. We need an
approach, processes, procedures, and technology—we
need governance.
In the world of enterprise architecture, governance
means control, or the ability to mandate the use of standards
and approaches, almost a management concept. In
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