As many organizations shift elements of their IT infrastructures to the public cloud, they must be aware of the new risks this move carries. Often, organizations make the false assumption that, in outsourcing the ownership of hardware and data center operations, they have also outsourced security to the cloud service provider.

While this is partially true because the organization is no longer required to deal with physical and infrastructure security, stakeholders are still responsible for compliance, data security, application security and possibly platform security if they are managing their own virtual machines or containers. A CSP’s documentation of the shared responsibility model will explain in more detail where it delineates responsibility.

In 2020, we’ve seen to what happens when companies roll out cloud collaboration solutions in a hurry. Forced by the COVID-19 pandemic to support remote work in new ways, many organizations struggled to deploy tools that met their performance needs, complied with their data safety regulations or even addressed their employees’ most common use cases.

With the lessons of 2020 still fresh, now is a great time for IT and business leaders to build an implementation roadmap for tools such as Microsoft Office 365. Here are seven steps they should consider along the way.

Cloud governance is a framework that guides how end users make use of cloud services by defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, improve efficiency and accelerate deployment. It’s imperative to have good cloud governance because it’s a foundational element to your cloud practice that provides the ability to scale and be successful.

Migrating to the cloud is an exciting journey as it provides greater flexibility to the IT teams for creating resources and provisioning them. Gone are the days when it used to take weeks and months to request resources and additional provisioning from the infrastructure teams. Cloud vendors now provide the capabilities to create resources such as compute instances plus add-on software, databases, firewall groups, storage, etc. via APIs.

The cloud-provided capabilities are very powerful and can potentially bring many inconsistencies and resource ownership issues into the environment.

For many organizations, a migration to public cloud is seen as a technical challenge with a set of tasks that need to be completed. In reality, it is far more than that, with areas outside of technology that need to be considered.

This blog post will touch on some of the more pertinent areas of your business that should be considered in your migration to the public cloud.

Roughly a decade ago, many businesses moved from legacy PBX (or private branch exchange) phone systems to on-premises Voice over IP (VoIP) systems. In more recent years, some organizations have taken the next step and moved away from on-premises to embrace cloud collaboration suites that incorporate voice, video, persistent chat, file sharing and other features in a hosted model with simplified management.

Still, many companies maintain their on-premises systems. Leaders at these organizations know they’ll likely need to deploy a cloud collaboration suite eventually. But to get the most value out of both their existing systems and their future solutions, they must carefully consider when, why and how to make the move.

In my last blog, 5 Disciplines of Cloud Governance for Azure, I talked about using the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Governance and using the five disciplines. In this blog, I will share more detail of how to implement these disciplines. The disciplines are cost management, security baseline, resource consistency, identity baseline and deployment acceleration. Each one of these disciplines can be viewed as a category of governance and used in a way to provide focus on key areas.

It is important to note that although they are separate, they do intermingle. Though it is possible to implement some governance by selecting a subset of disciplines, it is recommended to use all five disciplines as part of a governance minimum viable product (MVP) strategy.