You’ve migrated to the cloud and are using cloud services within your own team, but how do you scale that across the organization? A Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) is the best way to scale your usage of the cloud across multiple teams, especially when navigating organizational complexity.
What is a CCoE?
A Cloud Center of Excellence, or CCoE, is a group of cross-functional business leaders who collaboratively drive the best practices and standards that govern the cloud implementation strategy across their organization – developed in response to changes in the cloud. Pre-cloud, all of our infrastructure, usage, and deployments of applications were controlled by central IT. Typically, the IT department both made the infrastructure and applications available and had control over management. Now, in the post-cloud world, management in large enterprises is occurring in hundreds or thousands of places across the organization – rather than solely in central IT. Today’s cloud moves at a pace much faster than what we saw inside traditional data centers, and that speed requires new governance.
This seismic shift in responsibility and business-wide impact has brought both agility and innovation across organizations, but it can also introduce a fair amount of risk. A CCoE is a way to manage that risk with clear strategy development, governance, and buy-in from the top down. Utilizing stakeholders from finance and operations, architecture and security, a CCoE does not dictate or control cloud implementation but uses best practices and standards throughout the organization to make cloud management more effective.
Getting started with a CCoE
First and foremost, a CCoE cannot start without recognizing the need for it. If you’re scaling in the public cloud, and you do not require and reinforce best practices and standards, you will hit a wall. Without a CCoE, there will be a tipping point at which that easy agility and innovation you received leveraging the public cloud suddenly turns against you. A CCoE is not a discretionary mechanism, it’s actually a prerequisite to scaling in the cloud successfully.
Once you know the significance and meaning of your CCoE, you can adapt it to the needs of your business and the state of your maturity. You need a clear understanding of both how you’re currently using the cloud, as well as how you want to use it going forward.
In doing that, you also need to set appropriate expectations. Over time, what you need and expect from a CCoE will change. Based on size, market, goals, compliance regulations, stakeholder input, etc., the job of a CCoE is to manage cloud implementation while avoiding risk.
The key to a successful CCoE is balancing providing agility, innovation, and all the potential benefits of the cloud in a way that does not adversely impact your team’s ability to get things done. Even though the CCoE is driving strategy from the top, your employees need the freedom to make day-to-day management decisions, provision what they need and want, and use the agility provided by the cloud to be creative. It’s a fluid process much different from the rigid infrastructure planning of rack and stack used a decade ago.
Create an ongoing process with returns by partnering with a company who knows what you need not only today, but in the future. The right partner will provide the products, people and services that enable you to be successful. With all the complexity going on in the cloud, it’s extremely difficult to navigate and scale without an experienced expert.
2nd Watch Cloud Advisory Services Include a Cloud Readiness Assessment to evaluate your current IT estate, as well as a Cloud Migration Cost Assessment that estimates costs across various cloud providers. As a trusted advisor, we’re here to answer key questions, define strategy, manage change, and provide impartial advice on a wide range of issues critical to successful cloud modernization. Contact Us to see how we can make your CCoE an organizational success.
-Chris Garvey, EVP of Product
