What is Cloud Competence Center? Why teams must work on the cloud platform?8 min read

IT businesses must continuously adapt to the market’s complicated and ever-changing requirements. This is especially true when it comes to cloud-related concerns. As a result, we propose that you establish a Cloud Competence Center to provide technical and methodological assistance for upcoming cloud initiatives. It assists you in overcoming hurdles associated with the creation and usage of cloud solutions. Additionally, it fosters confidence and establishes the circumstances essential for the secure processing of data across all cloud services.

A flexible, cost-effective, and inventive business is a common objective for businesses and organisations today, and migrating to the cloud is a practical approach to accomplish that goal. Often, businesses develop a cloud strategy in order to achieve their corporate goals. However, with several providers and different options available, it’s sometimes difficult for businesses to decide on the “what and how,” leading to over-provisioned cloud resources and financial leaks.

This is where a Cloud Competence Center (CCC) comes into the picture. You may be wondering what a CCC is and why it matters to you.

Cloud Competence Center (CCC)

A Cloud Competence Center is a support function that enables developers to work more efficiently while also ensuring a consistent and safe cloud platform. Cloud Platform Development and Cloud Customer Onboarding are the two critical procedures. Cloud Platform development entails establishing and managing a Landing Zone. There is a need for shared services, security components, best practise architectures, and template solutions from development teams, the Cloud Steering Group, and the Cloud Competence Centre itself. The Cloud Competence Centre implements and maintains all of these.

Cloud Customer Onboarding is the process of familiarising a development team with the Cloud Platform and ensuring they adhere to best practices in design, security, and cost management. Additionally, the Cloud Competence Centre configures all necessary accounts, networking, and access for the team to rapidly begin development.

CCC assembles a cross-functional team comprised of Enterprise Architects, DevOps, CloudOps, Infrastructure, and Business to manage and lead the cloud transformation process. The Cloud Center of Excellence guarantees that all stakeholders comprehend not only cloud technology but also the cultural shifts required for cloud adoption.

Cloud Competence Center (CCC) Model

It brings together a broad and skilled group of experts from throughout the company to define cloud best practices that the rest of the organisation may adopt. The CCC serves as a support role, assisting the business in increasing productivity while also ensuring a consistent and secure cloud platform. It is built on Microsoft agile principles and a delivery architecture that enables a programmatic approach to implementing, managing, and operating the Microsoft Azure platform for the purpose of successfully onboarding projects and Azure workloads.

A CCC model necessitates coordination between the following:

• • Cloud adoption
  • Cloud strategy
  • Cloud governance
  • Cloud platform
  • Cloud automation

By addressing these issues, participants may expedite innovation and migration while lowering total change costs and boosting company agility. When properly implemented, a CCC will also result in a substantial cultural shift in information technology. Without the CCC paradigm, IT is prone to focus only on control and central accountability. A successful CCC model places a premium on autonomy and delegated authority. This is most effective in conjunction with a technology plan that incorporates a self-service model that empowers business units to make their own decisions. The CCC offers the firm a set of standards and defined and repeatable controls.

The Cloud Competence Center’s key objectives (CCC)

The CCC team’s major objective is to accelerate cloud adoption by leveraging cloud-native and hybrid solutions. The CCC’s aims are as follows:

• • Build a contemporary IT organization by collecting and implementing business needs using agile methodologies.
  • Build reusable deployment packages that adhere to all applicable security, compliance, and service management standards.
  • Maintain a working Azure platform in accordance with established policies and procedures
  • Conduct a review and approval process for the usage of cloud-native tools.
  • Standardise and automate widely used platform components and solutions over time.

Giving your team support and visibility will help to empower it.

Giving a Cloud Center of Excellence team support and visibility is the greatest approach to empower it. Platingnum claims that executive support is required for the team to plan, execute, and govern a company’s cloud transformation, whereas our post emphasises that the Cloud Center of Excellence team cannot achieve its goals without complete visibility of the infrastructure in order to assess spend and efficiency.

Setting up Standards, policies, and guidelines

In collaboration with cross-functional teams, CCC develops cloud policies and standards, assists in the planning of technological initiatives, and selects centralised governance solutions to handle financial and risk management.

Govern, Manage, and Report

An important goal of the Cloud competence center CCC streamline cloud utilisation is to select an effective approach to manage, control, and cost optimise heterogeneous cloud infrastructures and their expenses. This is crucial not just during the planning process, but also when running a hybrid IT landscape after the transition. The important phrase here is “right-sizing” all services based on actual use.
The Cloud competence center CCC should always have a comprehensive understanding of the current application and IT infrastructure ecosystem, as well as its dependencies. Specifically, with so many changing elements during the transition, it is critical that the Cloud competence center delivers reliable data on the status of the cloud transformation. The Cloud competence center also describes the application landscape’s cloud readiness, identifies optimum cloud providers, cloud target designs, and compute projected migration efforts and costs during the first assessment phase.

What are the most common hurdles in establishing a Cloud Competence Center?

• • There is a lack of awareness about public cloud platforms and how to use them in the workplace.
  • Because the cloud is a novel idea, it is difficult to determine who in the organisation owns it.
  • The new role needs a budget, which might be difficult to get.
  • Some development teams believe they can administer the platform without the assistance of a Cloud Competence Centre.
  • Many projects are already being run on the cloud without an appropriate governance mechanism.

How can you overcome these obstacles?

• • Develop a Cloud Governance Model early in the Cloud Journey,
  • Ascertain that all stakeholders appreciate the significance of administering the cloud platform and assisting development teams.
  • People should be educated on the benefits and new concepts of public cloud platforms.
  • Obtain assistance from a qualified partner in establishing the Cloud Competence Centre in collaboration with your own team.

The most important thing to remember when establishing a Cloud Competence Centre is that it must give value to its clients (the development teams). The Cloud Competence Centre must be highly knowledgeable in the cloud platform of choice, as well as be able to convey and record how to utilise the cloud. There will be less Shadow IT and more uniform, safe, and automated environments across all business units if you offer the teams a solution that speeds up their work and eases their migration to the cloud.

Implementation of a Cloud Competence Center

When determining how to implement CCC, the concept of one size does not fit all genuinely applies. There might be various methods to taking the road, but the fundamental premise for those approaches is driven by:

Ideation: Based on your cloud strategy, the first stage should be to analyse your present situation and create a gap analysis of where you want to go. This will assist identify the responsibilities and talents that are now available in your business and will be necessary to accomplish those strategic goals. The planner should be able to respond to the following questions:

• • Who should be a part of the CCC?
  • What are the strategic goals we hope to achieve with our CCC?
  • Where are we now in terms of maturity, and where do we aspire to be?

Realization: Once you’ve answered the preceding questions, the apparent next step is to establish duties. The build should be centred on: – 

• • Governance: Policy formulation and implementation
  • Security: Determining and enforcing legal and organisational compliance requirements
  • Platform: including architectural design and the adaptation of new developing services
  • People: Ensuring working methods and promoting higher adoption through cultural transformation

All of the preceding should be guided by the organisation’s cloud strategy.

The journey: The final but not least consideration is how you operate. With new ways of working, Cloud Competence Center must assure a distinct technique to function, focusing on: –

• • Collaborate: Because cloud adoption requires a cross-organizational effort encompassing many streams such as finance, business, and security, the Cloud Competence Center must function as a bridge connecting all the dots.
  • Define KPIs: Each firm may use various KPIs, but in general, they should be able to answer one question. “How can we assess the outcome of this change and the efficiency with which we use the cloud?”
  • Monitor: Is it really feasible to attain the goals if you are functioning without enough visibility?
  • Empower: The Cloud Competence Center will be given executive support so that it may bring in fresh and creative ideas without fear of failure. This innovative strategy has the potential to pave the way to success.

An excellent way to begin your cloud journey.

This article will assist businesses who are in the early stages of their cloud journey and are beginning to restructure their IT department to be ready for creativity, speed, and control. The Cloud Center of Excellence concept is an excellent choice for accelerating your cloud adoption effort.

We have a lot of expertise and best practices in executing IT transformations and Cloud Centers of Excellence for our business customers at Platingnum. To learn more about our experiences and what a CCC can accomplish for your company, please contact us at sagar@platingnum.com