Rest Assured

Governance in the Cloud?series

It's generally understood and accepted that organisational leadership invest much time and thought devising their future strategies, and implementation of these strategies involves many moving parts.

Whatever approaches and methodologies are used to execute them, leadership need to be assured, and have confidence, that they are being delivered with the appropriate safeguards supporting their strategic outcomes.

Of course there are many governance processes, policies and procedures that can be implemented depending on the area of the business that needs assurance, but the focus of this article concerns validation of architectural services for data analytics use cases in Microsoft's Cloud, specifically using the Microsoft Azure Well Architected Framework (WAF).

The diagram for the Azure WAF above, highlights the core pillars through which these use cases are assured:

- Security

- Cost Optimisation

- Operational Excellence

- Performance Efficiency

- Reliability

There are two key services I believe you should prioritise to support these five pillars of use case assurance, and that come ready to use, straight out of the box - Azure Advisor and WAF Assessments.

Azure Advisor is the go-to service for quickly identifying recommendations and areas for improvements for your Azure data workloads, summarised and aggregated across the five WAF pillars through the Azure Advisor Score. Most of my clients are already familiar with this capability, and they use it regularly, especially for the cost management features (see my pilot article for the Governance in the Cloud series). Azure Advisor is accessed directly from the Azure portal, and you can point it to any subscription that you have access to in your tenant.

What my clients are less familiar with, but absolutely love once they use it, are the Azure Well Architected Reviews. The Azure Well Architected Reviews are assessments that I run through with my clients to address key questions about the Azure services that have been deployed, or plan to be deployed for their data and analytics use cases. These questions are framed around the assurance and governance of the services being used to meet the use cases, the responses to which are curated recommendations, scores and overarching pointers to achieving excellence across the five WAF pillars.

The features my clients really appreciate about using the Azure Well Architected Reviews are:

- the reviews are not a one off process. An initial score and set of recommendations is a baseline, against which you can rerun the review as subsequent Milestone reviews. Depending on the client's situation, I tend to run Milestone reviews from monthly to quarterly, and they allow the client to see easily and clearly their progress towards, over time and multiple reviews, Azure architectural excellence. An improvement in WAF score, especially an increase, inspires confidence and assurance!

- by linking the Well Architected Reviews to the Azure subscription where the data and analytics uses cases are hosted, means that the Azure Advisor Scores can be surfaced and contextualised together with the recommendations of the reviews, giving a more rounded holistic view of the Well Architected guidance.

Whilst the Well Architected Reviews do take some time to complete, around half an hour for each of the five WAF pillars, subsequent milestone reviews take a fraction of the time, and my clients do agree that they provide valuable, transparent evidence to support confidence and assurance in the implementation of their data and analytics use cases!