Most companies, be it start-ups, mid-sized or large enterprises, are continually adapting new technology trends to integrate with business solutions for creating a better user experience & RoI. One of the significant technology trends we all have witnessed in the recent past is “Cloud computing.” It has hugely transformed the way organizations consume infrastructure exceeding the boundaries of their portfolio.
It has primarily started by accessing and leveraging cloud storage, thereby optimizing the cost in terms of purchasing additional hardware. Later, the focus has shifted to migrating the development and test servers to develop an understanding of the cloud offerings and observe the benefits before migrating their critical workloads. It took a while for the customers to get real confidence in cloud security and compliance before deploying their applications into the public cloud.
Cloud computing is continually evolving with a wide range of offerings, new features, and different pricing structures. Organizations should have a clear understanding of 360-degree cloud capabilities to extract their fullest potential.
Companies invariably try to harness technological advances as a competitive advantage to improve their business as it is imperative to stay ahead in the marketplace. Enterprises need a specialized team that understands technology and market dynamics for successful transformation. The smart way to achieve the rapid pace is to build a reliable & robust team “Cloud Center of Excellence” (CCoE)” of highly skilled individuals and experts.
They play a crucial role in providing multiple cloud solution offerings viz.
- Cloud Assessment & Consulting
- Cloud Migration
- Cloud Development & Deployment
- Cloud Infrastructure services
- Cloud Orchestration & Integration
- Cloud Adoption & Automation
- Cloud Optimization & Modernization
With such diverse Cloud offerings that exist today, it demands cross-functional teams with excellent skills & expertise for CCoE that can provide leadership and engineering support in Architecture, Security, Databases, DevOps, Bigdata, Machine learning. Besides the technical experts, it is highly recommended to have finance and operations teams who can work towards cost optimization and seamless execution, leading towards operational excellence.
As the cloud has the potential to impact every aspect of the business, application, data set, stakeholders, and associates across the entire organization CCoE should have diversified roles fully functional all the time. They must be customer-focused, Innovative, experimentation-driven, result-oriented, able to influence by providing strong direction from technology and business perspective.
Once the CCoE team is established, define the strategy for further expansion and execution.
- Define Cloud CoE vision & strategy
- Define Cloud roadmap & deployment plan
- Build credibility by defining the KPIs
- Run the pilot projects & often communicate with internal stakeholders and associates
- Increased level of partnership with cloud providers
- Establish operating principals
It is always important to set the scope, which has the agility to evolve over a period. Below is the list of few activities which may vary depending on the cloud operating model.
- Creating a practical roadmap for your cloud journey
- Planning proof of concept
- Deep dive on best practices and disseminate
- Accelerate experimentation with personalization models
- Accelerating performance at all layers
- Building event-driven & architectures
- Architecting for the cloud (lean architectures/ resilient systems/hybrid )
- Focus on cost management tools for cost & usage optimization
- Ways to achieve unparalleled elasticity at the lowest cost
- Extending the cloud experience to on-premises environments
- Powering next-gen cloud compute
- Run huge workloads at scale with cloud management tools.
- Dedicated focus on purpose-driven cloud databases
- Assessing, categorizing, optimizing & accelerating server, database and app migrations
- Accelerate digital transformation through cloud experience-based accelerators
- Quantifying the business value & managing cloud financials as you scale
- Suggesting the best re-platforming strategies for legacy workloads
- Enabling cloud management & governance, licenses on-premises & in the cloud
- Operational automation & Building a DevSecOps culture
- Automating security management, maturing and scaling security remediation
Another differentiating factor of CCoE is “Effective integration with Business.” CCoE needs to align itself with business initiatives and business metrics. Business integration isn’t just about financials and revenue. It’s also about stakeholders across different functions to achieve a common set of goals through effective collaboration. The more ingrained the CCoE into the business, the more efficient it will be.
CCoE should be Empowered to build and expand the team of certified professionals by continuous coaching and proliferation of up-to-date information & best practices that enable various teams and organizations to succeed in their cloud journey.