Extending Traditional IT-Governance Knowledge Towards SOA and Cloud Governance

Enterprises today often strive to keep up with the paces of technological development. A particular case in point is the IT function where traditional governance approaches are often questioned by technology trends. Examples for such trends in the last ten years are the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing. The introduction of SOA in the enterprise was one of the key enablers for cloud computing. Therefore, it can serve as a natural fit for bringing traditional IT governance approaches forward to the challenges of cloud governance. This article presents an approach for extending IT governance mindsets to the areas of SOA and cloud governance. It allows an IT organisation the adaptation and the continuous usage of already established governance knowledge and models during the adoption of cloud computing solutions. The authors also present an application case study where they demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in real-life scenarios in the context of an international telecommunication provider.