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How We Govern: The 5 Practices

How We Govern: The 5 Practices

How We Govern: The 5 Practices

Knowing what to govern is only half the battle. The real challenge of Cloud Governance is in the how: the repeatable practices that apply standards, enforce rules, and drive accountability across teams and environments.

We call these the 5 Practices of Cloud Governance. They represent the key mechanisms every organization needs to govern the cloud at scale.

Where the 5 Pillars describe the domains of governance, the 5 Practices describe the methods. These are the muscles and reflexes that make governance real, not just in documents or dashboards, but in daily decisions, tools, and behaviors.

Critically, these practices aren't just technical. Each one depends on people: aligning stakeholders, assigning ownership, and creating feedback loops for improvement. Governance doesn't work on teams. It works with them.

  • Practice 1: Standards

    Governance starts with a shared definition of good. Without clear standards, even well-intentioned teams drift in different directions, and governance becomes reactive, fragmented, and hard to enforce.

    Standards set the baseline for how your cloud should be built and operated. They translate broad principles into clear expectations for how teams structure accounts, secure data, control costs, and manage change. And when done right, they don't just define what "good" looks like. They help everyone recognize it, apply it, and improve on it.

    For standards to succeed, they must be specific enough to guide action, clear enough to avoid confusion, and flexible enough

    Practice 1: Standards610 words

  • Practice 2: Controls & Automation

    Good intentions don't govern clouds. Working controls do. Without real enforcement, standards become suggestions, and drift becomes inevitable. Controls are what turn policy into practice.

    Controls & Automation bring standards to life through technical enforcement: preventing mistakes, detecting issues, remediating violations, and routing ownership. When designed well, they increase consistency without slowing teams down, offering clarity, protection, and scale.

    This practice includes not just what controls you use, but how and where you apply them: across accounts, pipelines, and environments, with the right balance of flexibility and guardrails. A

    Practice 2: Controls & Automation554 words

  • Practice 3: Adoption

    Governance doesn't scale by decree. It scales through behavior. Standards and controls only work when teams choose to use them, not just in principle, but in everyday tools, decisions, and workflows. That choice is adoption: teams deciding to embrace governance because it helps them succeed.

    This practice focuses on creating the conditions for that choice. It means removing friction, offering support, and making the right thing easier to do. Adoption isn't a campaign. It's the result of governance that feels useful, embedded, and relevant to how teams actually build.

    Start here: Make adoption easier

    1. Explain how your cloud works Every organization ad
    Practice 3: Adoption535 words

  • Practice 4: Rollout

    Rolling out governance means putting standards and controls into effect across teams, environments, and timelines. Unlike adoption, which depends on voluntary behavior, rollout is a coordinated push: planned, prioritized, and paced for impact. This practice is about execution. It helps you roll out standards and controls by sequencing changes, reducing surprises, and scaling requirements in ways the organization can absorb and sustain.

    Start here: Progressive rollout

    1. Use a Draft → Preview → Check → Enforce lifecycle Rolling out controls in phases reduces risk and builds confidence. Start with Draft, where the cloud team can see the impact of a policy
    Practice 4: Rollout717 words

  • Practice 5: Measurement & Improvement

    If you don't measure governance, you're just hoping. In Cloud Governance, measurement isn't about tracking for tracking's sake. It's about learning. It's how you know what's working, what's not, and what to do next. Measurement closes the loop. It turns visibility into action and improvement into a habit.

    This practice ensures that standards don't grow stale, controls don't drift, and adoption doesn't stall. It connects dashboards to decisions, exceptions to insights, and outcomes to ownership.

    Start here: Track what matters

    1. Measure control coverage and effectiveness What percentage of accounts have landing zone controls in place? H
    Practice 5: Measurement & Improvement541 words

  • Key Takeaways

    • The 5 Practices of Cloud Governance define how governance is applied across your environment.
    • These practices include Standards, Controls, Adoption, Rollout, and Improvement: the repeatable methods that make governance real.
    • They embed governance into daily workflows through automation, shared tools, and continuous feedback.
    • When used together, the practices create a system that supports teams, accelerates progress, and evolves with your cloud.
    Key Takeaways68 words

  • What's Next

    The 5 Practices of Cloud Governance define how governance is applied across your environment through clear standards, embedded controls, active rollout, and continuous improvement.

    These practices bring the pillars to life, turning policies into action and systems into culture. But governance isn't a one-time effort. It's a living process that evolves with your teams, tools, and risks.

    For a complete overview of the Cloud Governance framework, see Cloud Governance 101.

    To explore the other components:

    What's Next128 words