The emergence of multi-cloud platforms, wherein resources and workloads are distributed over a vast array of environments and ecosystems, has made it absolutely essential for organization to ensure that their cloud governance policies are functional, highly streamlined and applicable to their specific business use case.
A good cloud governance policy will help a firm in not just keeping track of the costs of the resources it’s utilizing but also to take steps to reduce it significantly. Another important reason for having a cloud governance policy is to make the cloud resources transparent and easier to access for everyone within the organization.
Both of these needs are served by your cloud resource tagging policy, which is an integral part of your firm’s cloud governance policy. But first, what are tags anyways?
Tags in the cloud are just like tags you put on anything else. They are metadata labels, containing information on the resource you are viewing or want to view in order to make the tasks of accessing resources, lowering costs, running audits and fixes, optimization and adding or removing resources.
The Importance of Having a Tagging Policy:
Before starting tagging, you will need to define your tagging policy. This policy will chart out the specific ways in which you will define each asset or workload in your specific cloud environment. We recommend this because, since every organization’s cloud configurations and requirements are different, a singular tagging policy just won’t do any good.
The best approach to begin with defining your tagging policy is ensure that all of the stakeholders to your cloud resources provide their feedback on it. This will make sure that everyone has their requirements charted out and the tagging policy meets the needs of the global team.
Once you have formulated it, you will then be required to replicate it across the board on every single application or workload that you own.
Most teams that proceed towards tagging straightaway, without a policy to lead them through, will encounter roadblocks that will not just beat the purpose of tagging, but also create complex problems and inefficiencies which will be hard to weed out once the tags are in place.
When left on their own, teams and individuals will name tags on their own which can lead to duplication or confusion due to similar tags being used for entirely different resources. Policies help avoid such issues by providing teams with specific naming conventions for each specific asset.
This doesn’t mean that individuals and teams cannot name tags for resources they are utilizing on their team level. They certainly can, but only until the resource they are tagging is being used by them specifically.
A Tagging policy makes it easier to run through the implementation stage for tagging resources as well, because after the policy has been made, you can circulate it among your global teams and ask them to implement the policy on their resources.
Understanding The Different Tagging Policies Of Cloud Providers:
While tagging may sound easy, you need to understand that when you start implementing it, you will face some complex challenges that you have to overcome. One such challenge is to understand the different restrictions that cloud providers put on tagging different type of resources and the way you tag them.
AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, all have their specific tagging guidelines which you need to follow if you have resources in all three of these cloud platforms.
Here are the factors on which tags in these platforms differ from one another:
- Tags per resource
- Length of key
- Length of value
- Case sensitive
- Allowed characters
- Notes
- Taggable resources
- Documentation
The Step By Step Process To Your Tagging Policy Implementation:
To ensure that you go from each stage in the tagging process and are able to achieve the desired results from it, you need to follow this step by step process:
Stage 1: Formulating The Tagging Policy
Like mentioned earlier, you will first need to get a policy made that will guide your tagging policy. Stakeholder feedback is essential when building it and your cloud governance team should be the one tasked to get this process done.
Stage 2: Building The Reporting Standards
Timely reports on how the tagging policy is being implemented and the amount of resources that have been tagged need to be generated by the cloud governance team. This ensures transparency and tracking of all your tagged resources among global teams.
Stage 3: Alerts & Notifications
When resources that are the most important ones to be tagged are not provided with their tags by certain teams, the cloud governance team will get alerted via either email or some other form of notification, so that it can ask the reasons for delay and ensure that everything is one track to be tagged.
While most organizations stop here, one additional step for those who have consistent requirements for new resources to be pulled in is that they define the parameters on when a new resource will have to be tagged and if it remains untagged beyond that limit, the system should be automated to delete or remove that resource.
Leveraging Tagging For Improving Your Cloud Management:
Through following these steps, you can build and manage your tagging policy with utmost efficiency. Your cloud governance team can significantly improve most aspects of its work through an optimized tagging policy. From managing costs through improved access to managing security better, a tagging policy is essential to firms who use a complex cloud enterprise strategy.
If you have a cloud governance team, then asking them to learn cloud computing online or going through resource/research material related to tagging policies and implementation can help them understand the fundamentals of tagging so that they can then initiaite it within your organization for tangible business advantages.
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