During the winter of 2019, ONUG formed a collaborative with founding members FedEx, Cigna, Raytheon Technologies and ONUG. The mission of the Collaborative is to identify and provide solutions to cross industry, large enterprise issues, such as  Cybersecurity and data protection, that concern all large corporations. The founding members each hold steering committee seats to vote upon collaborative projects to pursue.

The first project of the ONUG Collaborative focused on automating cloud governance.  Why?  Because Governance gets in the way of all digital transformation projects and is the root cause of project failure, thanks to lack of control of information and data.

The Role of Working Groups

The ONUG Collaborative organized and funded a working group, populated it with a chairperson, editor, EA and program manager.   Each founding member appointed a professional or two to participate within the working group.  The  Collaborative invited companies to be members of the working group.  JP Morgan Chase, Kaiser Permanente, UBS, Concourse Labs, Pfizer, PNC and others become working group members or contributors.   Working group members provided funding and populated the working group with a dedicated professional.  The Automated Cloud Governance working group met weekly with monthly day long workshops.   The group worked throughout the global pandemic, meeting virtually to keep the project moving forward.

Deliverable #1 - Automated Cloud Governance White Paper

The first deliverable of the ONUG Collaborative is a white paper that describes a framework to achieve automated cloud governance.  In addition, the ONUG Spring conference, called ONUG Digital Live, is a special edition ONUG dedicated to the topic of automated cloud governance to initiate an industry conversation concerning its importance and explore solutions.  The white paper is a creative commons work and ONUG Digital Live is both virtual and free to attend.   The ONUG Collaborative believes that automating cloud governance will accelerate cloud consumption and compliance at the speed and scale of DevOps and re-configure the IT supply chain into the digital enterprise.

The Collaborative is now open to accept membership applications. See the form below to express your interest.

An Open Collaborative, what is it?

This collaborative is rooted in developing protections for corporations as they pivot to become digital enterprises engaged in the digital economy/market place.  DevOps and the new DevSecOps groups in ONUG are at the epicenter of this transformation.  

Who is Participating in the Collaborative?

FedEx, Cigna, Raytheon Technologies and ONUG founded the collaborative and are putting the weight of their brands behind projects that will benefit our organizations and the industry at large.  We are inviting additional companies to join the collaborative.

What is the first project of the collaborative?

One set of interrelated issues that is common to all corporations is that of security, policy, compliance and governance.  That is as organizations adopt cloud services, these services need to be integrated into our software pipelines/CICD process.   Governance is a key issue to assure that our corporation’s applications are safe in a multi-cloud world.  Governance is however mostly manual today.  This project is to automate cloud governance by providing a framework to code policy and governance all in an effort to gain agility, choice, options and security.

We seek  a new social compact or industry contract between buyers and sellers of IT products services.   We call for an “Open State Data” store.   Every device that an application dependents upon provides state data.  This could be a link is up or down, CPU utilization passes a determined threshold, memory usage passes a threshold, etc.  All of this data is unstructured, proprietary and unique to each vendor’s product such as firewalls, load balancers, WiFi gear, cloud provider services, switches, routers hypervisors etc.  

This first project  focused on Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS.  The collaborative is asking that every cloud provider deliver a standardized event notification framework taxonomy.  That is a common way to communicate security notification information (alerts, events, logs, metrics) from different cloud providers with consistent meaning and syntax so they may  be coded and thus automate mitigation responses and assure compliance to policy and governance.  This “ask” is the foundation of automated cloud governance.  Thus the collaborative  calls for this machine state data to be structured and open with common meaning to enable coding.  The entire ONUG community is advocating the same putting the $1.6Trillion of market capitalization of ONUG behind the collaborative’s work.

Why get involved in the Collaborative?

The ONUG  Collaborative provides a means for like minded  corporations to engage and work together in a problem-solving atmosphere/culture. 
Benefits include:

• Collaborating with peers in different industries to describe common industry problems and approaches to solutions
• Ability to change the industry narrative to solve real world problems that benefit your corporation and the industry at large
• Risk mitigation gained by understanding that the issues your corporation has are systemic and not unique to your organization

How do you get involved? 

Complete the form below to express your interest in working with the ONUG Collaborative.  We are accepting membership requests from Global 2000 corporations.

Steering Committee Board Member:  $50,000 Annual plus the appointment of appropriate executive(s) to participate within the working group(s).  Steering Committee board members receive voting rights to select working group projects and receive ONUG Corporate Sponsor Branding for a ONUG Conference that addresses a Collaborative topic.

Working Group Member:  $10,000 per working group project plus the appointment of appropriate executive(s) to participate within the working group(s).  Working group members receive content voting rights and listing of their brand on the final paper as well as speaking spots at ONUG.