This guide helps senior IT leaders create an audit-ready plan for cloud outsourcing governance. It addresses the realities of third-party arrangements—contracts, shared responsibility, data protection, and operational resilience.
Its strength lies in turning best practices into practical, plan-ready components that can be applied directly to vendor management, compliance, and continuity planning. Grounded in recognized standards such as the NIST Definition of Cloud Computing and established risk management frameworks, it delivers credible, actionable guidance for secure and resilient cloud adoption.
This Will Help You:
Turn the complexities of cloud outsourcing governance into clear deliverables and decisions you can stand behind. Each element in the guide connects directly to what you need to create or decide in practice.
- Risk Assessment & Due Diligence: Provides a structured approach for evaluating providers so you can make informed vendor selection decisions and set risk thresholds.
- Governance Structures: Outlines how to establish oversight forums and escalation paths, giving you a documented governance framework you can put in place.
- Data Security & Compliance Controls: Details encryption, access, and data residency requirements, helping you shape enforceable policies and contract clauses.
- Shared Responsibility Models: Clarifies division of roles between your organization and the provider, enabling you to build RACI matrices and operational playbooks.
- Operational Resilience Practices: Covers continuity, incident response, and recovery testing, guiding you to define resilience strategies and disaster recovery plans.
By applying these elements, you can build an audit-ready governance plan that is both actionable and defensible, with tangible outputs such as policies, contracts, frameworks, and playbooks that support better decision-making.
