Things change very quickly in the cloud, so it helps to have a team of people within your organization who stay up to date on current cloud trends, are leading organizational-wide cloud strategy efforts, and who are responsible for managing your company’s cloud environment. You might have heard this team being referred to as the Cloud Center of Excellence—but who are they exactly?
What is a Cloud Center of Excellence?
A CCoE is a cross-functional working group of people that govern the usage of the cloud across an organization and drive best practices across functions. By creating a CCoE focused on improving and maturing cloud visibility, optimization, governance and automation, and business integration, your organization can maximize all the benefits of cloud computing.
Learn more about the best CCoE practices in a multicloud environment.
The Cloud Center of Excellence is broken down into three areas, which are the most critical areas of the business when thinking of the cloud: financial management, operations, and security and compliance.
Three areas of excellence in a CCoE
Cloud financial management
Cloud financial management is the process of continuously optimizing and aligning cloud investments with strategic business initiatives. The financial management team focuses mainly on cost control to avoid waste and be aware of chargeback and showback.
In order to be successful, the cloud financial management function must understand how all components of a modern cloud environment contribute to TCO, make decisions based on accurate ROI analysis, and cultivate financial accountability and ownership across groups.
Cloud operations
Cloud operations is the process of managing and delivering cloud services that meet the availability, performance, recoverability, quality, and scalability needs of the business. The cloud operations team focuses on cloud optimization through KPIs, rightsizing infrastructure, and creating structure for configuration and usage of resources.
Establishing a fully functioning operations team requires ensuring operations meet and exceed business requirements, identify and act on areas to improve operational efficiency, and drive operational consistency across groups.
Cloud security and compliance
Cloud security and compliance is the process of proactively detecting and remediating vulnerabilities in your cloud environment. The team is centered around achieving real-time security insights, building guardrails, and managing cloud risk.
Cloud security compliance changes constantly, so staying up to date with relevant industry standards is necessary for competition. Additionally, as hackers’ methods of collecting data change, so does the threat and compliance landscape. Cloud security has to analyze all areas of the business, learn the business requirements, and translate them into cloud security standards.
Maintaining multicloud success
Each of these three areas are important to consider during your cloud journey. As companies mature through these phases, keeping a focus on cross-functional collaboration will ensure their cloud strategy evolves to successfully support all areas of the business.
