As more companies view cloud adoption as a strategic imperative underpinning their digital transformation efforts, they are turning to cloud centers of excellence (CCoEs) to manage the process and ensure organization-wide adoption of best practices.
CCoEs take the place of the ad hoc method that most companies use today. When a department or line of business wants to adopt cloud (and they actually tell IT about it first), then IT has to find the time and personnel to help the LOB achieve its goal. This takes time and effort away from other priorities as well as day-to-day operations.
“The challenge with large enterprises trying to do digital transformation is how do you have a common shared philosophy across the organization on how to approach cloud,” said Milin Patel, the principal architect and co-founder of the cloud consultancy Rearc and formerly the director of DevOps at Dow Jones, where he led the creation of the organization’s CCoE. “So, the CCoE is that central organization everyone can look up to and through which the CIO and the CTO are communicating what their vision is.”
With a CCoE, IT can set up the repeatable, federated policies, frameworks, procedures, and reference architectures the organization’s app/dev and infrastructure teams can follow as they migrate applications and infrastructure to the cloud. This saves time and effort while ensuring security and compliance matters, often neglected until the end of the migration process, are kept front and center.