Self-service financial control and organizational governance in cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing touts the benefits of self service and auto scaling, but its negative impact on an enterprise's business process and culture change is often neglected. This paper addresses two risks introduced by Cloud, i.e., losing financial control in IT spending and losing organizational governance. The root cause of these risks is due to the fact that the account structure in today's Cloud does not reflect the typical hierarchical organization structure in an enterprise. Therefore, it is hard to implement in Cloud the traditional business processes that enforce IT financial control and organizational governance. We propose a solution where the Cloud provider offers mechanisms to enforce financial control and organizational governance, while the policies are provided by customers through self service in the Cloud portal. Intuitively, we extend the concept of self service from resource provisioning into the area of financial control and organizational governance. Specifically, we introduce the concept of credit token in Cloud to resemble how budget allocation trickles down in a traditional organization, and introduce a hierarchical structure among Cloud accounts so that an ancestor account has privileges over a descendant account to enforce governance. © 2012 IFIP.