Cloud Governance

A fourth Industrial Revolution is underway globally; a digital revolution driven by the rapid, wide-scale deployment of digital technologies, such as in high-speed mobile Internet capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. Cloud computing is at the vanguard of this disruption and transformation. As a result, organizations of all sizes, sectors, and geographies have substantially and rapidly increased their adoption and use of cloud computing, including reliance on third party cloud service providers (CSPs). One driver in this proliferation and widespread use of cloud computing is the wide range of unparalleled opportunities provided by the cloud. Such opportunities include streamlining and scaling storage, software, and application support; increasing the speed of data access processing and decision-analytics; more productive customer engagement and empowered employees; reducing costs, such as outsourcing costly and difficult-to-update and -manage in-house IT infrastructure. As a result, organizations of all sizes, geographies, and sectors, are developing their own private cloud or purchasing public cloud services from cloud service providers. While such potential benefits are compelling, cloud computing disrupts corporate governance. Market intelligence reveals critical data, applications and some important roles and responsibilities for policies, security, IT management are increasingly moving from traditional IT departments internal to the organization to the cloud and to the day-to-day management off third party cloud service providers (CSPs). As a result, cloud computing is stressing enterprise governance in a number of ways, including further extending the enterprise's reliance on third party service providers, exacerbating existing risks, creating new and unexpected operational, cybersecurity and regulatory risks, and fueling an urgent need for more responsive and resilient enterprise risk management strategies and new skills. This disruptive paradigm is raising concerns and thorny questions from corporate boards, trustees, advisors, managers, regulators, and assurance providers about cloud governance, including strategy, performance, risks, controls, and skills. In this context, this book brings to life the diverse range of opportunities and challenges associated with governing the deployment and enterprise-wide use of cloud computing from a practitioner perspective. It will be a practical reference guide with chapter-based self-assessment questions and written in a user-friendly manner that should appeal to diversified cohorts of international students, operational and risk managers, boards, auditors, and advisors.