Top 10 Cloud Governance Best Practices

Cloud governance is the combination of processes, systems, and policies that enable you to control your cloud operations. It’s how you enforce the compliance rules and organizational requirements that keep your infrastructure running smoothly. 

Successful strategies span the four main cloud operations areas of security, compliance, performance, and costs.

Common cloud governance tasks include:

• Configuring infrastructure access controls: Utilizing IAM roles and policies to improve data security and prevent unauthorized infrastructure access
• Enforcing compliance requirements: Correctly configuring cloud infrastructure to meet your compliance needs, such as by activating audit logs
• Ensuring compatibility with applicable regulatory frameworks: Enabling available controls to maintain compliance with required legal, regulatory, and industry standards such as GDPR and HIPAA
• Implementing business and operational rules: Enforcing your own business rules and requirements, such as restricting when deployments can be made
• Maintaining control over cloud costs and budgets: Preventing budget overruns by tracking cost accruals and optimizing cloud spend

It’s easy to lose control of these processes when you’re operating cloud infrastructure at scale. Navigating fast-paced deployment cycles, complex multicloud architectures, and a dizzying array of compliance standards requires a cohesive cloud governance strategy driven by automation.

Key DevOps tools like CI/CD, IaC, and policy as code allow you to implement effective governance systems capable of scaling with your operations. Standardizing infrastructure deployments via CI/CD and IaC ensures there’s only one way for changes to reach your cloud accounts, for instance. 

It also provides an opportunity to govern the what, why, how, and who of new changes by enforcing policies within your pipelines. Even so, this is still just a starting point — let’s take a closer look at some leading strategies for sustainable cloud governance.

The following best practices support cloud governance requirements across the four pillars of security, compliance, performance, and costs. They help you realize the benefits of cloud infrastructure while avoiding common threats and risks. 

1. Automate your infrastructure processes
2. Use policy-as-code to enforce governance rules
3. Run IaC scan tools to detect misconfigurations
4. Lean on standardized cloud governance frameworks
5. Correctly configure and regularly review IAM policies
6. Monitor costs and budget usage
7. Use observability systems to detect possible problems
8. Implement audit logging to track cloud changes and risks
9. Set clear roles, responsibilities, and requirements
10. Create a culture of cloud governance

Including these techniques in your cloud adoption plan will allow you to operate your cloud environments with confidence, leading to improved DevOps outcomes.

Automating your infrastructure processes using CI/CD and IaC is arguably the best way to improve cloud governance. Eliminating manual interactions with cloud resources removes the risk of human error, lets you tighten up security around your cloud accounts, and ensures all changes can be attributed to specific commits in your IaC repositories.

Moreover, infrastructure automation is the foundation that lets you implement most of the other best practices on this list. By moving all infrastructure changes to deploy within CI/CD, you can layer in policy checks, scan tools, and reporting systems that prevent non-compliant configs from ever reaching your live infrastructure.

Spacelift‘s platform lets you automate your IaC deployments without having to set up CI/CD from scratch. Simply connect your IaC repositories, then use Spacelift to deploy your infrastructure to your cloud accounts using tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and more.

Policy as code is a policy enforcement method that uses expressive code files to define the conditions that allow a certain action. It offers similar benefits to IaC, but for governance use cases.

Policy-as-code engines like Open Policy Agent (OPA) and HashiCorp Sentinel let you write, version, and test your cloud governance rules using a code-based development process. You can then run your policies during your IaC deployment pipelines. 

Because cloud governance policies can implement any required logic, you can use them to block the deployment of IaC changes that would violate compliance standards or your own internal rules.

IaC scanning tools like KICS, Trivy, and Kubescape let you find misconfigurations in your cloud environments and IaC config files. This supports cloud governance requirements by letting you efficiently resolve issues that could impact your infrastructure’s security, compliance, or performance.

There are two main types of scan tools: static and dynamic. 

• Static scanning tools evaluate Terraform, CloudFormation, or Kubernetes manifests for security and compliance issues during development. These help catch problems like open security groups or improper IAM roles early in the CI/CD pipeline. However, they can’t detect drift or runtime-specific threats.
• Dynamic scanning tools probe deployed resources, such as cloud accounts, VMs, containers, and Kubernetes clusters, to uncover misconfigurations, over-permissive roles, and exposed services that may emerge post-deployment. This ensures visibility into issues caused by manual changes or external integrations.

Read more: Top 10 Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scanning Tools

Industry-standard cloud governance frameworks are a useful starting point to guide your own governance initiatives. Assessing your cloud environments against frameworks such as the NIST Cloud Computing Framework can help you quickly find areas to improve upon.

Similarly, aiming for compliance with more generalized IT standards like ISO 27001 and SOC 2 will steer you towards an improved governance posture. Defining your own policies based on these frameworks lets you efficiently secure your environments with less chance of oversights occurring.

Correct access controls are a crucial part of cloud governance. To control your cloud resources, you need to limit access exclusively to the users who need it. Regularly reviewing your cloud IAM users, roles, and policies helps mitigate the risks posed by unused, forgotten, or overprivileged accounts. 

Similarly, correctly configuring RBAC controls in platforms like Kubernetes enables you to effectively govern who can perform sensitive tasks.

Cost management is an important part of effective cloud governance. In busy cloud environments, it’s easy to lose sight of how different infrastructure resources affect your bill. Furthermore, missing governance controls can mean redundant resources stay running in your cloud accounts when they’re no longer needed, which is a waste of money. Utilize real-time cost management tools like AWS Cost Explorer, CloudZero, and Infracost to precisely track your stack’s costs and prevent bill shock. 

You can also use Spacelift’s Infracost integration to estimate the cost impact of infrastructure changes before you deploy, right within your IaC pull requests. This lets you eliminate guesswork and make more informed infrastructure spending decisions.

Effective cloud governance depends on clear visibility into what’s happening in your environments. Regularly monitoring cloud utilization stats with tools like AWS CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Datadog lets you detect anomalies that could indicate emerging performance, stability, or security issues.

Linking all your cloud accounts to a unified observability solution enables you to join the dots between trends so you can fully investigate your infrastructure’s state. It means you can govern based on real data and reduce your incident response times.

The ability to track the who, how, and why of different cloud infrastructure changes directly impacts governance outcomes. Without this data, it can be difficult or impossible to investigate suspected incidents. It’s best practice to choose tools and systems that generate a full audit trail for each event and make sure those auditing capabilities are actually enabled.

Major cloud providers include built-in audit log features, but they may need to be customized for your account’s services and users. AWS offers CloudTrail, for instance, while Google provides Cloud Audit Logs.

However, audit requirements aren’t constrained to your cloud accounts: You should also ensure IaC commits, pull requests, and deployments can be attributed to the users and events that created them. 

If you’re using Spacelift’s Enterprise plan, you can view a detailed audit trail from your account’s admin section. This documents all your Spacelift activity, including stack updates and trigger events, so you can clearly see the context surrounding changes to your cloud infrastructure.

Maintaining effective cloud governance at scale is a team effort. To succeed, you need to ensure everyone involved with your cloud infrastructure has clearly assigned roles and responsibilities. This matters because it allows you to precisely configure access controls and avoid confusion over who’s doing what.

Having dedicated compliance managers, cloud security leads, and finance controllers also means development and operations teams know who to contact when there’s a problem or specific changes are required. The named contacts can enforce governance standards while helping the cloud deployment process to run more smoothly overall.

Similarly, clearly stating cloud requirements, such as each team sticking to a budget or labeling its resources to aid identification, makes governance initiatives more successful. Development teams are more likely to face issues if they don’t know what’s expected of them, so be sure to communicate why different policies are being introduced.

Implementing an effective cloud governance strategy requires your organization to accept the resulting change. Correctly governing cloud accounts requires a degree of access constraint, accountability, and process standardization that may produce some cultural pushback. 

It’s important to anticipate this by building a governance culture that prompts everyone to value the impact of cloud security, compliance, and cost management controls.

To achieve this change, team members need to understand your governance requirements, how controls will be enforced, and what they can do to help. This creates a positive environment where developers, operators, and other stakeholders are more likely to contribute to governance mechanisms, instead of resisting them. 

When everyone is on board, cloud governance is easier because team members will naturally collaborate to identify and resolve risks arising from their own areas of responsibility.

Implementing cloud governance can be a complex process that involves establishing and enforcing policies, procedures, and controls across an organization’s cloud infrastructure. Here are the key challenges organizations typically face:

Spacelift is a platform designed to manage IaC tools such as OpenTofu, Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Pulumi, Ansible, and Terragrunt, allowing teams to use their favorite tools without compromising functionality or efficiency taking cloud automation and orchestration to the next level. 

Spacelift provides a unified interface for deploying, managing, and controlling cloud resources across various providers. Still, it is API-first, so whatever you can do in the interface, you could do via the API, the CLI it offers, or even the OpenTofu/Terraform provider.

The platform enhances collaboration among DevOps teams, streamlines workflow management, and enforces governance across all infrastructure deployments. Spacelift’s dashboard provides visibility into the state of your infrastructure, enabling real-time monitoring and decision-making. It can also detect and remediate drift.

You can leverage your favorite VCS (GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket/Azure DevOps), and executing multi-IaC workflows is a question of simply implementing dependencies and sharing outputs between your configurations.

With Spacelift, you get:

• Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
• Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
• Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
• Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
• Drift detection and optional remediation

If you want to learn more about Spacelift, create a free account today or book a demo with one of our engineers.

Implementing a robust cloud governance strategy ensures your cloud operations run reliably while meeting all business requirements. Effective governance procedures prevent security issues, compliance breaches, and cost overruns, protecting your organization from common cloud risks.

The best practices featured above all contribute to a scalable cloud governance strategy. Automating your infrastructure processes, using robust policy-as-code engines, and configuring dependable observability solutions lets you take control of your cloud environments. 

Regularly running cloud scanning tools and checking for audit log anomalies helps you efficiently find and fix any lingering problems.

Because automation is the key to cloud governance success, optimizing your IaC workflows is the best way to get started. Try using Spacelift to unify your infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and management processes across all your IaC tools and cloud providers. With built-in policy as code, safe self-service access, and clear visibility into deployed resources, Spacelift makes it simple to enhance cloud governance at scale.