Why did we write the ITAM Accelerate Cloud Process Kit? Some time ago, we felt a major sense of achievement having mapped 44 HAM & SAM processes to an ISO19770-1 level. Fast-forward to today, though, and on-prem-only management just doesn’t cut it.
ITAM Accelerate Cloud Process Kit: Introduction
Cloud spending is now one of the largest uncontrolled line items in enterprise IT. Gartner estimates organisations waste around 30% of their cloud spend. Most IT leaders are still managing cloud assets with SAM processes built for the on-premise era. Those processes were designed for perpetual licenses, fixed estates, and annual true-ups. They are the wrong tool for the job.
The problem is architectural. Traditional SAM treats the software license as the unit of governance. In cloud, the unit is consumption — elastic, ephemeral, and metered by the second. Bolting a SAM process kit onto a cloud environment produces a governance gap, not a solution.
This is precisely the problem the ITAM Accelerate Cloud Process Kit was built to solve.
The kit comprises 26 discrete, sequenced processes (C01–C26). Its lineage matters. The Cloud Process Kit is grounded in the ISO 19770 series — the international standard family for IT Asset Management. ISO 19770 provides the definitional rigour that generic cloud cost frameworks lack. It distinguishes assets from expenditure, governance from optimisation, and accountability from visibility. That distinction is foundational.
The 26 processes span the full cloud asset lifecycle. Coverage runs from cloud strategy and service catalogue management through to cost optimisation, right-sizing, reserved instance planning, tagging governance, and cloud exit. Each process maps to organisational roles, tooling touch-points, and measurable outputs. This is not abstract guidance. It is an operational blueprint.
For IT leaders, the business case is clear. Ungoverned cloud estates carry three compounding risks. First, financial waste through over-provisioning and shadow spend. Second, compliance exposure through un-tracked SaaS and IaaS consumption. Third, strategic drift as cloud costs erode the investment margin available for genuine transformation. Addressing all three requires process discipline — not just better tooling.
ITAM Accelerate Process Kit & FinOps
The distinction from FinOps is deliberate. FinOps optimises spend. ITAM governs assets. You cannot sustainably optimise what you have not first governed. C01–C08 establish the governance foundations. C09–C26 build optimisation and compliance capability on top — in the correct sequence.
Cloud governance is not a technology problem. It is a process maturity problem. The ISO 19770 lineage gives the Cloud Process Kit something most frameworks cannot claim: a standards-backed, auditable foundation for every process it defines.
The organisations that will lead over the next five years are those that govern their cloud estate with the same discipline applied to their most critical on-premise assets.
Ready to close the gap? The ITAM Accelerate Cloud Process Kit is available at this link. Explore the full process kit — and see how ISO 19770-grounded governance transforms cloud from a cost problem into a controlled asset.