Cloud CoE Framework
Changing consumer demands, rapidly evolving business models, and the advent of new technologies have given rise to significant shifts in the business landscape. In order to remain competitive, organizations need to be innovative, adaptive, and responsive, all while seeking lower costs. Cloud has proved to be a critical factor in enabling this transformation.
Moving to the cloud has been a key focus for organizations as they seek to capitalize on the anticipated benefits including improving time to market, driving operational efficiencies, building a culture of innovation, increasing business agility, and reducing overall expenses. Gaining these benefits however requires a strategic and structured approach to enable the creation of long-term value.
Establishing a CCoE is an important factor in any organization’s journey to the cloud. The CCoE advocates for the move to the cloud, creating enthusiasm and momentum across the organization. It defines the cloud strategy in alignment with organization strategy, provides enterprise cloud governance, collates and disseminates the best practices, tools, and methods for cloud adoption, while providing training and operational support for business, IT, and application teams to migrate to the cloud.
The CCoE should be structured for governance, strategy, and engineering, and be staffed by team members with cross-functional skillsets which can be easily leveraged to deliver the many activities required. While providing careful consideration to the team structure and staffing, the CCoE should also define a clear framework by which it operates in order to provide delineation of its role and responsibilities within the broader organization.
The CCoE framework is defined based on five domains:
· Strategy: Creating the cloud strategy and aligning with the organization’s business and IT strategy
· Adoption: Defining the cloud adoption framework to provide a structured approach for the organization’s move to the cloud
· Governance: Developing the cloud governance policies and guidelines for cloud and providing advisory on cloud methodology
· Knowledge: Administering training and maintaining the repository of best practices and lessons learnt
· Operations: Monitoring and optimizing cloud usage for cost, security, data, network etc.
The CCoE framework should also be aligned to a cloud adoption framework which will provide the guidelines and methodologies required for the organization to adopt cloud. By owning and maintaining the cloud adoption framework, the CCoE takes the lead in enabling project teams across the organization set up and migrate their workloads to the cloud.
By setting up a CCoE in the above manner and providing it with the executive sponsorship required to carry out its activities, an organization can expect to gain multiple benefits including:
· Establishing a cloud transformation and strategy
· Delivering business and IT agility
· Aligning stakeholders to cloud adoption
· Defining enterprise cloud governance and cloud engineering
· Reducing time to market
· Reducing cost, improving performance, and security
· Increasing reliability
· Improving operational excellence
· Innovating by leveraging cloud
· Thought leadership on cloud adoption
Structure of the Cloud Center of Excellence
A CCoE provides the leadership, knowledge, and support required to enable an organization to successfully move to the cloud. It will provide the necessary governance for cloud adoption while also defining the strategy, best practices, tools, and methods to support the longer-term journey.
Establishing a CCoE is critical to ensure that there is alignment between the business’s goals and longer-term vision with the various cloud migration activities being undertaken within the organization. The oversight provided by the CCoE will also help drive a cohesive approach across the organization in terms of how the cloud is adopted and operated. It is important to provide careful consideration to how the CCoE is setup and how it governs so that it is designed to function optimally within the existing organizational structure.
The CCoE should be structured according to its primary functions of organization alignment, strategy, governance, and engineering as summarized below.
While the CCoE should have an overall lead (the ‘CCoE Head’), each function described above should also have a dedicated lead who will be accountable for the key activities and deliverables within that area.
Conclusion:
Enterprise cloud transformation will be efficient if they follow above CoE Framework and best practices.
