Why Cloud Governance Matters | Former Microsoft CIO Shares 

In Episode 6 of CloudBrew, former Microsoft CIO, Jim DuBois, joins CoreStack to discuss why cloud governance is the next frontier to master. 

You’ve heard cloud governance matters, but why?  

Is cloud governance a now conversation? Is it the new cloud frontier to master? According to former Microsoft CIO, Jim DuBois, the answer is a resounding yes. 

In Episode 6 of CloudBrew, CoreStack's NextGen Cloud Governance podcast, DuBois—a decorated tech veteran and sought-after board consultant—provides unique guidance on these topics with the ultimate goal of, as he says, “doing cloud the right way.” 

Doing Cloud Right
“Everybody is doing something in cloud now and there's a lot of discussion about it,” shares DuBois. “The issue really is, did we do it right when we moved to cloud and can we manage things while we’re in cloud? The people that have pulled back to on-prem probably should have just fixed how they were doing it in cloud. And this whole area of governance really is about making sure we’re doing cloud right. How do we make sure we’re focusing on the right things for security, the right things for managing our costs, the right things for getting the agility that we really need out of cloud. So, governance is all about doing cloud right.”  

Lesson Learned from Early Azure
One advantage of having a 25-year Microsoft vet on your podcast is hearing about the early days of cloud. As we all know, the past shapes the present.  

“When we were first moving everything into Azure, it was the Wild West days of cloud migration. Obviously, we had motivation to move, because we’re Microsoft and wanted to push the edge of Azure to make it better,” recalls DuBois.  

“We were treated like an external customer; we had to pay for our usage; we had to do everything that a normal customer would. They wanted us to play that role so that we could give feedback to the product teams. And there wasn't anything like what CoreStack does today; back then, we built some custom things to help us do governance. But we didn't have tools like what’s on the market today with companies like CoreStack. So, I wish we had that. I think it would have helped us manage and do a better job.” 

The Next Cloud Frontier to Master
As DuBois reports, “Everybody wants to talk about the cost of cloud, but there's so many things you can do to manage costs better and have cloud be more cost-efficient than what you had on-prem. The real value we found was the ability to change things quickly, to spin things up and not have these monolithic, pre-production environments that slow down our release of new capabilities.” 

DuBois uses security as an example: “If you're going to make sure that you're secure, one of the key things you have to understand is where all your assets are, so you know that you're protecting them. The cloud actually makes that way more complicated because you're spinning things up and down all the time. There's no way you can track it all manually, because it's coming and going all the time. So, you must have governance in place to help you manage. Governance helps you make sure all your security configurations are right where they need to be—that you're only spinning up things when you need to. So, we need to think of the value that you can get out of the cloud, not as being less expensive than on-prem infrastructure, but because of the agility and how you can accelerate what you're doing. Governance is making sure you can manage at the pace you need to deliver value faster.”  

A “Now Conversation”
As much of the industry is slowly deciphering cloud governance, most CIOs agree that it’s a now conversation. DuBois is no different: “You’ve got to be able to show that you can deliver faster and at a lower cost. This is not an ‘or conversation.’ The board, the business execs, they don’t even need to know that it's cloud; what they need to know is that they're getting value faster. Cloud is one of the biggest tools to have and it's only going to happen if you manage it well.”  

DuBois references the competition as he sums up his thoughts on cloud governance: 

“It's about the pace just continuing to accelerate. You must make sure that you can operate at that pace safely. You must have the governance across the whole thing so that you can do that. And if you can't, you’re going to fall behind the companies that are able to go at the pace that—that innovation is happening.”