International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Vivek K. Sharma
Abstract: As cloud computing adoption accelerates across enterprises, ensuring secure and compliant cloud governance has become a critical challenge. Traditional manual governance approaches are often inadequate to manage dynamic, complex, and multi-cloud environments, resulting in misconfigurations, security vulnerabilities, and regulatory non-compliance. Policy-based automation has emerged as a transformative solution, enabling organizations to define, enforce, and monitor security, compliance, and operational policies automatically. By embedding governance rules into automated workflows, organizations can achieve consistent policy enforcement, rapid remediation of violations, and continuous compliance without extensive human intervention. This approach enhances operational efficiency, reduces errors, and strengthens the overall security posture of cloud environments. The review explores the components of policy-based automation, including policy engines, orchestration tools, and integration frameworks, as well as its applications in automated security enforcement, compliance management, and operational governance. It highlights real-world case studies demonstrating measurable improvements in governance effectiveness, compliance adherence, and incident response times. While policy-based automation offers substantial benefits, challenges such as policy complexity, integration across multiple cloud platforms, over-automation risks, skill gaps, and scalability considerations remain.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17798791
