Auditing the Cloud: A Work in Progress
February 6, 2013
Grazed from FutureGov. Author: Sri Narayanan.
With all the buzz around cloud computing, it’s easy to ignore the more mundane aspects of auditing and cost allocation when investing in the cloud. In a recent conversation with Philippine CIOs during a breakfast meeting in Manila, the question of government auditing and budgeting guidelines for cloud services spurred a spirited exchange. They readily admitted to grappling with how to set accounting guidelines for cloud services even as the Philippines sets aggressive targets to move public services to the cloud. The issue is one of governance and control; if you can’t see what you’re buying, how would you know what you’re actually spending on?
The problem, it seems, is that the public sector is not quite sure what to make of the ‘utility or pay-as-you-go model’ of cloud computing. While there are provisions for subscription-based resourcing for commodities such as energy supplies, there is precious little literature preparing the government sector for subscription-based cloud computing. The same applies to annual contracts for Infrastructure- or Platform-as-a-Service solutions…
I believe the problem is that it is difficult to make honest comparisons between cloud computing and internal IT. It’s not as simple as buying four times the memory for your server upgrades or doubling the CPU clock speed. That kind of hard comparison doesn’t always work with cloud computing…
Read more from the source @ http://www.futuregov.asia/blog/2013/feb/6/auditing-cloud-work-progress/