cloud best practices Archives

Cloud Center of Excellence: 3 Foundational Areas with 4 Phases of Maturity

A cloud center of excellence (CCoE) is essential for successful, efficient, and effective cloud implementation across your organization. Although the strategies look different for each business, there are three areas of focus, and four phases of maturity within those areas, that are important markers for any CCoE.

1. Financial Management

As you move to the public cloud and begin accessing the innovation and agility offered, it comes with the potential for budget overruns. Without proper planning and inclusion of financial leaders, you may find you’re not only paying for datacenters, but you’re also racking up large, and growing, public cloud bills. Financial management needs to be centrally governed, but extremely deliberate because it touches hundreds of thousands of places across your organization.

You may think involving finance will be painful but brining all stakeholders to the table equally has proven highly effective. Over the last five years, there’s been a revolution in how finance can effectively engage in cloud and infrastructure management. This emerging model, guided by the CCoE, enables organizations to justify leveraging the cloud, not only based on agility and innovation, but also cost. Increasingly, organizations are achieving both better economics and gaining the ability to do things in the cloud that cannot be done inside datacenters.

2. Operations

To harness the power and scale possible in the cloud, you need to put standards and best practices in place. These often start around configuration – tagging policies, reference architectures, workloads, virtual machines, storage, and performance characteristics. Standardization is a prerequisite to repeatability and is the driving force behind gaining the best ROI from the cloud.

Today, we’re actually seeing that traditional application of the cloud does not yield the best economic benefits available. For decades, we accepted an architectural model where the operating system was central to the way we built, deployed, and managed applications. However, when you look beyond the operating system, whether it’s containers or the rich array of platform services available, you start to see new opportunities that aren’t available inside datacenters.

When you’re not consuming the capital expenditure for the infrastructure you have available to you, and you’re only consuming it when you need it, you can really start to unlock the power of the cloud. There are many more workloads available to take advantage of as well. The more you start to build cloud native, or cloud centric architecture, the more potential you have to maximize financial benefits.

3. Cloud Security and Compliance

Cloud speed is fast. Much faster than what’s possible in datacenters. Avoid a potentially fatal breach, data disruption, or noncompliance penalty with strict security and compliance practices. You should be confident in the tools you implement throughout your organization, especially where the cloud is being managed day to day and changes are being driven. With each change and new instance, make sure you’re following the CCoE recommendations with respect to industry, state, and federal compliance regulations.

4. Phase Cloud Maturity Model

CloudHealth put forward a cloud maturity model based on patterns observed in over 10,000 customer interactions in the cloud. Like a traditional maturity model, the bottom left represents immaturity in the cloud, and the upper right signifies high maturity. Within each of the three foundational areas – financial management, operations, and security and compliance – an organization needs to scale and mature through the following four phases.

Phase 1: Visibility

Maturity starts at the most basic level by gaining visibility into your current architecture. Visibility gives you the connective tissue necessary to make smart decisions – although it doesn’t actually make those decisions obvious to you. First, know what you’re running, why you’re running it, and the cost. Then, analyze how it aligns with your organization from a business perspective.

Phase 2: Optimization

The goal here is all around optimization within each of the three areas. In regards to financial management and operations, you need to size a workload appropriately to support demand, but without going over capacity. In the case of security, optimization is proactively monitoring all of the hundreds of thousands of changes that occur across the organization each day. The strategy and tools you use to optimize must be in accordance with the best practices in your standards and policies.

Phase 3: Governance and Automation

In this phase you’re moving away from just pushing out dashboards, notification alerts, or reports to stakeholders. Now, it’s about strategically monitoring for the ideal state of workloads and applications in your business services. How do you automate the outcomes you want? The goal is to keep it in the optimum state all the time, or nearly all the time, without manual tasks and the risks of human error.

Phase 4: Business Integration

This is the ultimate state where the cloud gets integrated with your enterprise dashboards and service catalogue, and everything is connected across the organization. You’re no longer focused on the destination of the cloud. Instead, the cloud is just part of how you transact business.

As you move through each phase, establish measurements of cloud maturity using KPIs and simple metrics. Enlist the help of a partner like 2nd Watch that can provide expertise, automation, and software so you can achieve better business outcomes regardless of your cloud goals. Contact Us to understand how our cloud optimization services are maximizing returns.

-Chris Garvey, EVP of Product

Building your Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)

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