Governance is key, for successful and effective IT operations.
People, policies and processes are the key dimensions in governance. Those dimensions, combined with service life-cycle models, forms the basis for SOA governance today.
How does cloud computing help with Governance? Well the trivial answer is to say that, lets make governance available as a service. That could be a big chunk in governance in cloud era, but that alone is not it.
To start simple, the cloud self service models will allow faster provisioning cycles to that the developers/testers that are involved with service life-cycles can be more productive with delivering services.
For example, say that we have a simple service life-cycle:
design <-> implement <-> test <-> stage <-> deploy
Now, when going though the life-cycle of a service, people involved require various resources. For example, the developer need to have a setup to do unit tests during implementation phase. And the resources for testing could be allocated from the application server as a service, rather than having to have dedicated machine and have the trouble of installing and configuring the application server. The developer can use his or her own tenant to develop and test his code, without having to trouble anyone or block anyone.
When the service goes to testing phase, again the quality assurance people can drop the service into their own tenant space, where they have all dependencies, contexts and environments pre-setup and test in quick time. Again no setup time, not installation of app servers and no need to have dedicated hardware.
When the service moves along the life-cycle, so does the resource requirements by various team members and the on-damed resource provisioning of the cloud can cater to all time based demand by various sub teams as opposed to dedicated resources for each sub team.
Thus, cloud naturally fits into SOA governance needs and saves both time and money.
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