Building a Cloud Centre of Excellence Model

Digital Transformation with the Cloud

The recent pandemic accelerated digital transformation by several years, based on a survey of executives by McKinsey Global. This includes digitising interactions between customers and supply chains by 3-4 years and supply of digital products by 7 years, according to the McKinsey report in Oct 2020. 

When looking at digital transformation in the modern age, access to highly available and resilient infrastructure to support such transformation will undoubtedly leverage cloud adoption. Yet, this comes with its own challenges, including concerns over security, productivity, scalability, and most importantly in a post-pandemic era - expenditure.

All of this can be addressed with a governance and control strategy by way of Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) practices.

What is a Cloud Centre of Excellence?

Firstly, CCoE is a team resource – a mix of skills and specialisms that assimilate the spectrum of Cloud resourcing requirements, which I'll expand on this later.

To help address the concerns raised about migrating to the cloud, organisations can consult CCoE teams, who deliver ownership and direction when migrating workloads to the cloud and ongoing cloud usage.

Such teams provide the required governance and controls to quality check the use of cloud for the organisation. CCoE, much like other areas of excellence, such as Security Centre of Excellence practices, must permeate the entire organisation to mitigate risks from poor cloud implementations and management.

As described earlier, digital transformation affects internal processes and external engagements (e.g., supply chain interactions, customer interactions) and ongoing research and development with digital products to retain innovation and competitiveness. Therefore, being able to access and apply the benefits of CCoE is increasingly seen as a critical business requirement.

Consider the security risks of an R&D department with weak governance and control over its cloud resources. Would you not want to safely contain access to such resources to protect your ongoing R&D investments? 

Organisations that embrace the cloud on a larger scale, with migrations of data centres and applications, including provisioning of hybrid environments, need governance and control of the cloud. Having a CCoE team can help mitigate risks such as security or expenditure across the board. Solid architecture with resource planning and access is required, with centralised controls placed on subscription, databases and networking to keep security, compliance and expenditure in check.

Building a CCoE Team and Understanding its Responsibilities

Creating a CCoE team will require bringing together expertise from across the organisation, where internal dialogue between different departments can help communicate CCoE practices across the business. Furthermore, new processes can be discussed for the rest of the organisation to adopt. Senior management can rest assured that such processes have been devised by the CCoE team to ensure risk mitigation and increased productivity. 

Having an in-house CCoE team can include personnel from several departments, including IT operations, finance, solution/infrastructure architects, devops and networking. This team should consist of people who have day-to-day usage of the cloud and who are up to speed with compliance to ensure excellence is maintained. 

 CCoE responsibilities are broad but can be broken down into the following:

• Capture business requirements and deploy reusable work packages that align with security, compliance, and service management policies.
• Maintain cloud infrastructure and review apps routinely.
• Automate cloud enabled processes.
• Adhere to compliance and risk mitigation.

CCoE as a Service

At Altiatech, we have developed an in-house CCoE as a Service. By partnering with us, Altiatech can provide your organisation with the right strategic direction you need to instil CCoE practices. 

We work with your existing personnel to recruit the most experienced talent from your organisation and co-produce processes that fulfil the role of a CCoE. In doing so, Altiatech will help reduce your risks from cloud usage without stifling business productivity and innovation. 

Our development team can also explore cloud automation to reduce human dependencies whilst staying compliant, providing you with a safe pair of hands with our expert advice.

Want to know more about our Cloud Services? Contact Altiatech today!