ICYMI: Do you need a Cloud Center of Excellence?

In the past few years, cloud computing has become a dominant trend in

enterprise It, but the challenge of transforming

your organization from an onpremise company to

a cloud centric organization can be daunting.

Is your organization struggling with this transformation?

Maybe you need a cloud. Center of Excellence. Want to

learn more? Okay, let's go.

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Lee Atchison in the past few

years, cloud computing has become a dominant trend in enterprise It.

The benefits of moving to the cloud are clear lower costs,

flexibility, and scalability. But as more

companies move their infrastructure into public clouds like AWS or

Azure, they face a challenge that is often overlooked.

How do I transform an organization from a typical on premise

company to a cloud native, cloud centric organization?

A Cloud Center of Excellence, or CCoE for short,

is an organizational entity that has emerged as

a driving influence, enabling the cloud native transformation to accelerate.

As cloudbased applications become ubiquitous and

cloud adoption rates continue to grow, CCOEs are becoming

more prevalent in many modern organizations. But what does

a Cloud Center of Excellence actually look like and

how do they assist in your organization's transformation?

Well, there are as many ways to construct a CCoE

as there are ways to construct an It department.

At its core, the CCoE is an organizational

structure that is designed to accelerate the adoption

and institution of cloud products,

cloud principles, and cloud mindset into an organization.

They are designed to be the beacon that helps drive an organization

to become a cloud native organization.

To understand how they can help drive an organization to cloud success,

here are six ways a Cloud Center of Excellence can be

a helpful tool in your organization's cloud journey.

First, they provide best practices and provide

an example for the organization to follow.

The CCoE is designed to be a beacon for becoming

cloud centric and is sought out by other business units

and project teams. CCoE's represent an example of

how to operate in a cloud centric world using cloud

native tools. The CCoE

is responsible for creating,

articulating, championing,

and documenting best practices for the rest of the organization to

follow. As an organizationwide

standard, they point the organization in the right direction

and helps prevent some of the common errors

and pitfalls from being repeated by every single

group in the organization. As the owner of best practices

and their requirements, they engage the organization

and drive the adoption of these best practices within

their organizations. Leading by example and

acting the role of the organizational respected leaders is

critical for cloud success. Besides cloud

specific processes, CCOEs provide best

practices in a variety of other related areas,

including providing standardized coding practices,

tool usage, and use of specific development

methodologies and practices. This includes

concepts such as enabling microservice architectures,

use of CI CD pipelines, and leveraging DevOps best

practices. It's important that

these best practices are championed by someone able to

enforce the adaption across the entire organization,

and the CCoE can provide this leadership.

Second, they provide training for your

teams. In order to be

successful in a cloud centric world, your teams must be knowledgeable

and experienced in all aspects of using the cloud.

This means cloud training, but what training

does your organization require? Well, the CCoE is

responsible for facilitating the training requirements for your entire organization

in all things cloud related. These trainings can be

created and directed by the CCoE team members that are evaluating

cloud related products, services and systems. Or they

can be formalized structured training programs that the CCoE

has evaluated and approved.

However, the training is executed, the CCoE is

responsible for providing the cloud training requirements

for the entire organization. Third, they create

tooling and standards for the organization. A common

and serious problem facing any organization going through

a major restructure is how do they create the tools

and implement standards necessary to thrive in their

new reality? A cloud centric restructuring

is no exception.

Basic cloud needs must be provided in clear and consistent

ways. How do you do deployments to cloud services?

What operating system image do you need on your cloud servers?

How do you create tooling that you can replicate for development,

staging and test environments as well as for

production environments? What setups are needed

by development engineers to build and deploy cloud

services? How do you tag cloud

resources so you know who is using them?

How do you determine what resources should be implemented and

who makes those decisions? Can you use this

brand new cloud service? What settings of

this service are appropriate? Should I use this feature or

capability of this service? How do you deploy this

service in a standard way across the organization?

And how do you handle monitoring, logging and analytics

from the cloud services? How do you set up security settings

in the cloud to meet the needs of your organization's, security team

and business needs? How do you incorporate the cloud changes

into assisting and driving your other corporate initiatives such

as, for instance, DevOps standard setups

can ease the cloud efforts of other groups in the organization

as well as ensure appropriate and consistent practices.

The CCoE can lead the setup of these tools

and standards, leading to improved overall organizational

cloud enablement and consistent behaviors and

practices across the entire organization.

Fourth, they provide subject matter expertise to

upper management. When an organization undergoes a transformation

to a cloud centric organization, they often face difficult

organizational level decisions. Upper management

needs information and expertise in order to make these decisions.

That expertise comes from the experience of the CCoE.

The CCoE is staffed with subject matter experts

that can provide expert guidance and direction on

cloud best practices. By using their

expertise to assist upper management, they help promote widespread

adoption across the entire organization.

Fifth, CCoE's make, buy, make and other

decisions for the company on the cloud.

An organization needs to make many decisions about which cloud capabilities

to use, which cloud providers to use,

and how to use them. Should we build a

required tool or should we bring in a third party equivalent?

These sorts of decisions need to be made by individuals who are

both expert in the cloud as well as expert in

the internal needs of the organization and their applications.

The CCoE, with the appropriate expertise in both areas,

provides the perfect group to make these decisions.

They provide responsible and expert decisions on

which vendors to engage, which services to enable,

and which capabilities to utilize.

It's important to establish organizational structure early

on in any cloud transformation in order to prevent decision

paralysis and make sure business objectives stay aligned

with those decisions. And finally,

number six, they manage external cloud relationships.

A cloud centric organization will have many external cloud partners,

providers, vendors, and other external parties

that they need to coordinate with. The CCoE

is a natural place to coordinate these relationships,

whether it's being the primary contact for vendors or attending

meetups with partners or championing company cloud

progress with partners and customers,

the CCoE's unique combination of cloud and

corporate knowledge provides the experience necessary to

manage these relationships. Having a

centralized team in control of these relationships ensures

that there is always someone within your organization that

knows how these outside vendors work,

what they offer, and when they should be used.

So how do CCOEs fit into modern It organizations?

In most cases, they report to either the CIO or

the head of engineering. This allows them to work closely

with other key parts of the organization, such as application development

teams, operations teams, and of course, the security

team. By having a centralized unit

that is responsible for all things cloud, the CCoE

helps ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards

common goals. A cloud center of excellence

can be an extremely valuable asset for an organization looking to

move to the cloud. While any organization can benefit from

the structure, the larger the organization and the more significant

the cloud transformation, the greater the benefits

the CCoE can bring.

CCOEs provide a wide range of benefits and

can help your organization through the web of complexity involved

in a typical cloud adoption transformation.

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