Tagging Strategy
A defined, enforced set of metadata labels applied to every resource, without which cost allocation, ownership and lifecycle automation are all impossible.
Tags look like housekeeping and are load-bearing. Almost every governance capability depends on them: cost allocation and showback, identifying an owner during an incident, applying lifecycle automation, scoping security policy, and knowing which resources belong to a decommissioned project.
A workable minimum, and it should be short enough that people comply: owner (a team, resolvable to a person), environment, cost centre or product, data classification, and optionally expiry for anything temporary.
The word that matters is enforced. Tagging by convention achieves perhaps half coverage, and half coverage makes cost reports unusable and ownership unreliable. Enforcement means policy that refuses resource creation without required tags, applied through preventive controls rather than a report listing violations after the fact.
Two practical details. Tags applied at creation are far more reliable than tags applied later, so the enforcement point is the provisioning pipeline. And inheritance is limited — child resources often do not inherit tags automatically, which is why cost allocation coverage stalls around 60% in estates that assumed they would.
The measure of success is allocation coverage: the share of spend attributable to a team. Below about 90%, the reports are arguable and therefore ignored.