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Why would you need a Cloud Center of Excellence?  Let’s give 10 good reasons.  Part 2 …

Optimised Architecture through reference architectures

In a recent customer conversation on a CCoE, a customer said: “I believe we have a lot of trees, but we can’t see the woods”.  A lot of customers have done proof of concepts or pilots with cloud technology.  That’s the perfect way to start.  But you can’t go on adding more and more of these experiments.  Each proof of concept is free to experiment with cloud technology.  Once you want to move to production workloads it’s a different story.  Just on the topic of architecture, you want some standards.  Any cloud has lots of different ways to achieve the same thing.  Randomly, by workload, picking what that team wants is not the way to go.  In a CCoE the capability around reference architectures will drive this required standardisation.

Reliable Security

What is true for the overall architecture is even more true for security. A proof of concept will put “some” security in place.  But once you move to production workloads, you want a robust, standardized security architecture.  Security is one of our 6 pillars of the 45 Degrees approach to a CCoE. We believe it’s that important that we did split it as a separate pillar, seperate from the platform pillar.

Cloud operational excellence

Standardizing architectures is one topic.  Standardizing on how you operate the cloud workloads is at least as critical.  Operations in a cloud world is very different from “on premise operations”.  Whether you want to do it yourself or want to use a managed service provider for cloud operations, you still have to take a lot of decisions to ensure an optimized operational efficiency of your cloud workloads for cloud operational excellence.

Lower cost of IT

Bad news: moving all your workloads to the cloud is no guarantee for a lower cost of IT …  Cloud technology CAN lower your cost of IT.  But it’s not something that will just happen by itself.  A CCoE program has a lot of attention to this topic, in various capability workstreams.  From architectural decisions, over efficient backlog management to optimal operations.

OPEX IT cost model

Last but not least, the cloud is indeed offering an OPEX cost model.  You pay for what you consume.  It means you get a lot of flexibility to try things out without setting up a major investment program.  It also means you will have to learn to do IT budgeting in a model where workloads are not linked to hardware in your own datacenter.  Or you will need to learn to charge groups of users based on their consumption.  A CCoE fclouprogram will help you get there.