Ensure maximum benefit from the cloud with a center of excellence
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
The cloud offers innumerable advantages, including improved agility, faster development cycles, reduced cost, and better automation. But these benefits are not realized by just embracing the cloud. To truly capitalize on the agility and value it can provide, organizations need to adopt a new operating and development paradigm, and that requires a change in culture, people, and processes.
Establishing a cloud center of excellence (CoE) is one of the best ways to ensure that the move is as seamless and beneficial as possible. From establishing the right processes to helping a team make decisions, a cloud CoE provides the structure and approach required for success across both business and technical dimensions.
A cloud CoE helps an organization benefit from “invisible infrastructure” in the following ways:
Drives strong alignment between IT and the business
In a cloud-based model, IT moves with greater agility to serve the needs of the business. To do so, it needs to be much more closely connected than ever before. A cloud CoE facilitates strong alignment between IT and the business and helps measure the business impact of cloud-based initiatives.
Establishes an effective governance model
IT organizations need to put the processes in place to successfully manage the transition to a cloud way of working and a cloud-first mindset. From portfolio management to measurement, a cloud center of excellence establishes the methodologies and oversight structure required. This involves evolving the leadership and PMO organization to take into account and manage cloud cost economics and incentives, cloud architecture standards and governance, and Agile teams with fixed capacity that can flex up for special projects.
Ensures team readiness
Moving to the cloud requires a shift in both what the IT team works on and how it works. A cloud center of excellence establishes the roles needed to support cloud transformation and builds and executes on a change-management plan to transform the organization to support a cloud-first way of working. It covers resourcing, training, and development.
Determines the right architecture to enable change
When optimizing the move to the cloud, having the right architecture across infrastructure, applications, services, and components is critical. A reference architecture managed by the cloud CoE ensures that teams have the right templates as well as the right vocabulary for systems and solutions architectures, provisioning, and application development.
Provides operational oversight
A cloud CoE ensures that the run and operations of IT workloads in the cloud are as smooth and effective as possible. It defines not just current operating procedures but also the changes that need to take place for successful cloud adoption. It includes monitoring, inventory management, reporting, and disaster recovery, among others.
A big motivator to move to the cloud is automation and self-service. Setting up the proper provisioning and DevSecOps processes, tools, and pilots will ensure speed and agility are realized while making sure business risks are properly managed through compliance, security, and testing.
To start building a cloud CoE, strong executive support and vision are required to enable organization change. Bringing in experienced SMEs also helps guide and support the existing team during the transition. Once established, the structure and focus will continue to change as you move from the initial cloud adoption phase to one more focused on cloud-native and transformation initiatives.
Jason Hatch is the head of enterprise cloud platforms within the application and cloud technologies group within Capgemini North America. For more information about how to harness the power of cloud and application technologies to make digital business a reality, access The digital CIO’s handbook here.
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