10 Cloud Governance
This chapter covers
- The fundamentals of cloud governance and its connection to FinOps principles.
- The structure, roles, and responsibilities of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE).
- Governance maturity models and how to assess and evolve your practices.
- A guide to bootstrapping governance in a FinOps-enabled environment.
The practical FinOps techniques explored in previous chapters—from cost allocation to resource optimization—are essential for managing cloud spend. At scale, however, their effectiveness diminishes without a formal structure to guide their application. When numerous teams deploy services across multiple accounts and regions, inconsistent tagging, unreviewed budget overruns, and compliance gaps become common operational risks.
These issues typically stem from a lack of systematic oversight, not from the failure of any single team. Cloud governance provides that oversight. It is the operational framework of policies, processes, and tools that ensures all cloud usage aligns with an organization’s financial, security, and operational objectives.
This chapter defines the components of cloud governance, explains its integration with FinOps, and presents an operating model to enforce, measure, and assign ownership for cost optimization across the organization.