IT Admins are stressed now more than ever. Firstly, IT budgets are not growing, in fact they are either shrinking or remaining consistent. Research by Statista from March 2020, shows that 39% of respondents expect IT budgets to shrink, whereas 40% expect their budget to not change. Thus, IT is expected to do more while their budget remains the same or less.
Secondly, because of Covid-19 most of the end-users are working from home to respect the social distancing norms. However, IT is expected to deliver on the promise of resiliency 24/7. At the same time, they are expected to now integrate new solutions such as video conferencing, VPN, and security solutions in the existing solution set without dropping the ball––all while keeping the lights on.
Shadow IT Strikes Once More
Shadow IT is the consumption of resources by users without IT being aware of them. These resources might not only be in public clouds. They can be in the form of SaaS services or any other third-party software. Shadow IT is on the uptick since IT has been busy with meeting increased expectations and answering late-night calls for the failure of expectations or resources.
Shadow IT can lead to a complete lack of control in terms of data, security, and access management. It can also lead to more expensive resources being used for development/test workloads. Or in general, it can lead to resources being wasted. This can also create challenges around accountability and oversight on expenses. In fact, research from McAfee highlights that Shadow IT cloud usage is 10X the known cloud usage.
Plus, shadow IT can lead to security lapses or oversights. For example, databases being left insecure, use of easy to crack passwords, or ports being kept open by mistake. These small mistakes can be difficult to recover from and result in big losses. Gartner states that 33% of security attacks will be on shadow IT resources.
You do not want to be caught into this chaos caused by shadow IT. It can be detrimental to you, your business, and your customers. At a time where your customers want to keep things afloat efficiently, you do not want to be the reason for turbulence. These mistakes might be difficult to recover from in the current environment.
Governance is the Solution
Being proactive always pays off. Governance acts like your shield and can protect you from shadow IT to a large extent. If you have the right levers in place you can ensure that shadow IT is limited. It is an iterative process that might take a longer time to establish but it can pay rich dividends once in place. Governance gives you more control without sacrificing the agility your users need in the first place. You need to add governance best practices on top of cloud providers or on-premises infrastructure governance.
Governance encompasses things such as cost management, security, identity management, etc. It is an ever-evolving process needed to safeguard your environment. It extends across the data center, multi-clouds, and SaaS solutions you are using. Governance can help you leap forward ahead since you address blindspots before they unleash chaos.
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Role-based access control (RBAC) is a powerful and a must-have tool in your kit. It is a foundational element of your governance strategy. RBAC helps you provide users access to various resources based on the roles that are assigned to them. You can define various actions your users can take in your IT environment using RBAC.
However, your IT environment will get more complex as you adopt new solutions and onboard new users. For example, management is easy when you have only two workloads in your data center. However, as you adopt public cloud solutions, new messaging services, sales pipeline tracking software, etc., maintaining RBAC can get out of hand very quickly as the number of workloads and users increases.
CloudBolt Provides RBAC-based Governance For Your Hybrid Cloud
As things get more complicated and out of hand you need a reliable solution that is used by enterprises on a global scale. CloudBolt, a leading cloud management platform, is trusted by organizations of all sizes for their governance requirements across hybrid and multi-clouds. CloudBolt’s role-based access control helps you manage access to your users across various environments. It helps you control access by assigning simple roles that come pre-defined in the platform. However, we understand that not all organizations are made similar. So, if you want to define your own role and thus control access differently for your users, you can easily do that.
There are five different group roles that come out-of-the-box with CloudBolt.
- Viewer: Basic permission to view Group servers, members, and activity.
- Requestor: Request orders for creating, modifying, or deleting servers individually or within a group to which they belong.
- Approver: Approve any requested orders for fulfillment.
- Resource Admin: Manage Parameters and networks on Groups, as well as Blueprints and servers.
- Group Admin: Manages organizational aspects of this group: membership and permissions, subgroup creation and management, and delegation of responsibilities to other group members.
You can further use these roles in your groups and in environments. Each user or a group can be assigned any combination of these roles, and depending on which roles they have, a user will be given the ability to perform certain individual or group-related actions. You can customize what permissions each of these roles have as desired, or even delete them if they are not needed.
Benefits of Role-Based Access Control in CloudBolt
Having RBAC in your arsenal can help you with the following (among others):
- Control the chaos. Know your systems and their users.
- Alleviate the painstaking approval process by triggering permissions based on groups, costs, and services
- Keep users from over-provisioning resources
- Know the details of a user and group-specific resource usage
- Manage better with approval workflows
- Use quotas, resource expirations, and power scheduling with RBAC to further reduce costs
In conclusion, governance with RBAC helps you control shadow IT and better manage your IT environment without sacrificing agility. CloudBolt is used by hundreds of organizations to govern their IT environment easily through a single console. Schedule a quick demo today to see governance in action.
