Last week, Microsoft held their annual partner conference called Microsoft Inspire. Inspire is different from Microsoft’s other flagship conferences like Build and Ignite in that it focuses uniquely on Microsoft’s partners rather than developers or IT business leaders. Major public cloud platform providers like Microsoft and Amazon generate billions of dollars in revenue every year from solutions delivered by partners in their ecosystems. Given the cloud’s programmability and extensibility these ecosystems of partners offer high-value, integrated tools and services that help customers solve their cloud problems. Since the big cloud platforms are largely homogeneous – i.e. most companies, big or small, are using largely the same Azure – they can release features, tools, and guidance that apply across their entire platform and these can then be leveraged by partners to enable customers.
Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure
One of Microsoft’s chief announcements at Inspire was their new Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. The framework was a direct response to feedback from customers and partners alike; the cloud is at this point essential and the allure of the speed and efficiency is irresistible, but once companies hit a modicum of scale, governance becomes a persistent problem and the cloud journey tends to plateau. Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure makes cloud adoption easier for both customers and partners by providing a “single voice” for guidance, best-practices, and tools. The cloud offers tremendous flexibility but customers still need a proven, consistent methodology to guide their cloud journey.
On the Road with OpsCompass
As a Microsoft Gold ISV partner, OpsCompass has been deeply involved with the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, providing customer feedback from the field and collaborating with Microsoft on a 3 city roadshow to educate customers about the framework and enabling it with our governance product, Helm. Previously, customers would deal with one partner with its own approach and another with their own take on cloud best-practices. Microsoft’s new framework aligns partners around common methodologies, lexicon, features, and tooling. This helps the customer by providing not only consistency between partners, but also alignment between those partners, tool vendors, and the cloud platform’s themselves. Cloud adoption just got a lot easier.
Helm: The Process Component of Governance
Helm fits right into the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and helps customers with the process of enforcing governance and compliance on a day-to-day, and in the cloud, potentially a minute-to-minute basis. The Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure defines the five core disciplines of cloud governance as Cost Management, Security, Resource Consistency, Identity, and Deployment Acceleration. Helm’s whole-cloud configuration drift detection, baseline enforcement, and compliance analysis give customers a turn-key way to have an automated, continuous process for adhering to your governance standards and enabling those five disciplines across your cloud environments.
Conclusion
Don’t let the otherwise inevitable plateau of governance issues impact your cloud progress as you scale; get out in front of the potential problem. The Cloud Adoption Framework helps align strategies for business, culture, and technical change to achieve the desired business outcomes. It is vital that a cloud adoption strategy is clearly defined, a plan is in place, and best practices are implemented before confidently migrating and innovating in the cloud. Once risk decisions are converted into policy statements to establish cloud adoption boundaries and compliance, Helm ensures that you stay that way by maintaining your cloud configuration baseline, enforcing policy guardrails, detecting risky drift, and enabling continuous compliance.
If you’d like to learn more about enforcing cloud governance and compliance, or want to see Helm’s monitoring ability in action schedule a quick demo today.
For additional information contact Scott Griffith at sgriffith(at)opscompassdev2.wpengine.com.
