Four Reasons You Should Care About Cloud Naming Conventions

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it turns out.

If you work using a cloud environment, you’ll need to use naming conventions to keep everything in order. Cloud naming conventions help to streamline administration, improve version control, and avoid any duplication of documents. If you want to keep your cloud environment tidy and ensure document processes remain efficient, naming conventions are the key.

What is a naming convention?

A naming convention is an agreed scheme for naming things. A historical, and famous, example is the Dewey Decimal system, used to classify library books via subject. Cloud naming conventions have a similar function, helping IT teams to classify documents in their cloud environment.

Why are naming conventions important for the cloud?

According to Microsoft, a good name helps you quickly identify a resource type, associated workload, deployment environment, and the region hosting it. A consistent naming strategy is important and should be an essential part of setting up your cloud environment. Here are four key reasons you should care about cloud naming conventions:

1. Support governance and regulatory compliance

Maintaining a consistent naming strategy supports cloud governance and helps you meet compliance regulations.

Cloud governance is a carefully prescribed set of protocols that underpins the organization of your cloud environment. Naming conventions are just one part of that. Names will shine a light on what type of resource you’re dealing with, to which project it belongs, and where it’s located.

A proper naming convention helps you and other users to find a resource. It also enhances security and compliance protocols. Whatever your industry, there are pressures to meet certain audits and compliance assessments. An effective cloud governance system, with naming conventions as a part of it, will streamline your cloud environment. This ensures you have a comprehensive and organized archive of company documents, which makes it easier to demonstrate compliance.

2. Run operational management

Operational management involves managing the operations of your business, as well as improving policies and processes for greater efficiency.

Cloud naming conventions are a key part of that, making it easy to find electronic records. Naming resources consistently, and in a logical structure, distinguishes one document from another and facilitates the quick retrieval of documents.

A clear naming convention also fast-tracks business processes that rely on storing, retrieving, and sharing documents. To ensure efficiency in the execution of projects, it’s crucial to install governance protocols, with naming conventions as part of that.

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3. Meet accounting requirements

Cloud naming conventions help your business to determine how to record business transactions — to comply with company standards. Cloud governance, using cloud naming conventions, brings accounting documentation into the cloud using an organized structure.

Naming standards allow you to easily store and retrieve transactional documents. They promote consistency across documentation and make the preparation of financial documents easy to iterate. These help to standardize the financial reporting process.

4. Ensure robust security

Cloud naming conventions enhance security across your cloud environment. They create a secure system by which documents holding sensitive or confidential information can be named and filed properly.

A naming system that correctly identifies confidential documents will reduce mistakes, secure information from malicious actors (in the case of a cyberattack for example), and reduce time troubleshooting.

A cloud or Azure naming convention serves to highlight those documents that need protecting most. It can help you to identify documents which might need password protection or a more secure environment to reside in. Ultimately, it’s another way to bolster your cloud environment, taking a preventative approach to a potential security breach.

What’s in a name?

Cloud and Azure naming conventions are a key part of cloud governance and compliance. They are the first step in organizing your cloud environment, helping to identify a resource type, the workload associated with it, and the region hosting it. This will help your business support regulatory compliance, run operations more efficiently, meet accounting requirements, and provide robust security against cyberattacks. Learn more about Azure resource naming in a related blog post.

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