Cloud Center of Excellence
How to create a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE)
What is a Cloud Centre of Excellence?
A CCoE provides a centralised cloud function within the organisation, providing such things as:
- Clarity, direction and evolution of the organisation’s cloud strategy. This includes cloud evangelisation.
- Ownership and maintenance of the organisation’s cloud principles.
- Ownership, management and evolution of the organisation’s repeatable blueprints for how to use cloud.
- Ownership of the organisation’s cloud best practices, standards and policies.
- Cloud advisory: helping cloud adopters to understand “how to cloud”, leveraging the artefacts already mentioned.
- Ownership of cloud governance, which should be used for such things as: ratifying principles, standards and blueprints; approving use of products and technologies; approving solution designs and ensuring such designs are aligned to the aforementioned principles, standards, blueprints, and organisational strategy.
- Cloud optimisation: supporting the continual evolution of how to manage cloud at scale, balancing cost with risk and reliability.
- Cloud comms: routine and relevant communication, covering all of the above points.
In Google’s document Building a Cloud Centre of Excellence, they offer recommendations for what the CCoE should provide, based on the maturity of the organisation:
Google’s CCoE activities and outcomes, based on maturity
Why Do We Need One?
Without a CCoE, the organisation is likely to make a lot of mistakes. Such as:
- Unmanaged cloud sprawl.
- Using multiple different patterns and products to solve the same problem.
- Cloud solution designs that make use of unapproved or otherwise problematic products and technologies.
- A lack of knowledge sharing between teams and siloes. And, associated with this, lots of teams reinventing the wheel.
- A lack of alignment to the organisation’s cloud principles.
- Inefficiencies in using cloud. Particularly around centralised best practices around FinOps.
Who Needs to be in the CCoE?
This centralised team needs to have representation from several areas, including:
- Cloud architects — those who know how how to leverage cloud properly, and have visibility across a plethora of cloud solution designs. They build and evolve the repeatable blueprints of the organisation. They keep current with the latest capabilities of the cloud (which changes frequently, compared to on-prem capabilities), and make sure that these latest innovations and capabilities are adopted in the enterprise.
- Cloud platform / infrastructure engineers — those who have strong hands-on knowledge of cloud infrastructure products and services, including any integration with on-prem infrastructure. They will typically also have strong knowledge of any shared services, such as the shared VPC and associated services.
- SRE — to ensure that SRE best practices are being observed.
- Security SMEs — those who understand the security requirements and policies of the organisation, and who have an understanding of the cloud products in this space.
- Cloud application engineers — those who have strong hands-on implementation knowledge. They have intimate understanding of the approved cloud products in use by the organisation, as well as the organisation’s (DevOps) software development lifecycle and tooling. They are able to surface repeatable implementation challenges, as well as help in defining repeatable solutions.
- Data / data science SME — someone who understands the existing data estate, and has a clear view of the goals for migrating such data into the cloud ecosystem. They will also bring knowledge of ETL technologies and data science and analytics.
- FinOps — those who are maintaining the best practices for cost-effective use of cloud, and who are constantly reviewing the costs of how cloud is being utilised in the organisation. Also, with their holistic view, they are able to recommend and implement organisation-wide cost efficiency approaches, such as committed use discounts.
- CCoE lead — someone who is ultimately owns the objectives and deliverables of the CCoE, and liaises with C-levels, the Exec, and any major programme leads.
Ultimate, the team should not be too large, but needs to have representation from all of these areas. A CCoE team size of around 12–15 people would be reasonable. But crucially, this central team is integrated with the many other teams and functions that are stakeholders of the cloud adoption and consumption journey, such as: CTO and CISO, the architecture practice, the engineering practice, security, SRE and platform team(s), migration programmes, any existing infrastructure teams, and finally: strategy and innovation teams.
Furthermore, this central CCoE team needs to be accessible. It needs to be perceived as a force for good that helps to eliminate barriers for cloud adoption, in a repeatable and scalable way. It needs to provide the appropriate support to anyon that needs it. Though often, this support will be in the form of sign-posting to appropriate collateral, or to some of those other aforementioned teams.
How to Build the CCoE
Firstly: it requires strong executive sponsorship. As I’ve mentioned before, cloud adoption needs to be a top-down initiative. It requires a clear vision and a strong mandate. Without these things, the CCoE has no authority. And without authority, many individuals, teams, and functions will:
- Ignore the guidance of the CCoE.
- Feel free to circumvent governance.
- And worst of all: choose to pretent that cloud adoption is not happening. They will continue to do things the way they always used to. And they will continue to invest in non-strategic, legacy technologies.
Secondly: establish the CCoE as early as possible. There is a lot to do in the early stages, including: setting up cloud governance, establish the landing zone and how it will be used, defining blueprints, and defining migration patterns. This needs to be managed and centralised.
Once you’re in a position to create the CCoE, you should look to populate the team based on the roles I described above. And once again, you should be looking to appoint people who are:
- Credible — so consider using well-respected talent
- Cloud advocates — so use people who are passionate about cloud
- Technologists — you need technical knowledge in this team
Again, consider embedding cloud advisory SMEs from a consultancy, in order to embed best practice into your new CCoE.
Conclusions
Organisational change is required, if an enterprise is going to be successful in their cloud adoption. The entire IT organisation needs to understand cloud basics, and everyone needs to adopt the cloud-first mentality. Legacy infrastructure siloes need to be removed, and a new paradigm of infrastructure-as-code needs to be adopted.
Crucially, the organisation should build a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) to kickstart, accelerate, govern, scale and optimise the cloud adoption journey.
