Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE): 7 Core Tasks

Organizations that strategically want to move to the cloud to reduce costs and become more agile, face many problems. For example, due to a large number of involved actors, the uncertainty of business effects, use of new technologies, the fragmentation of the legacy IT landscape as well as the compliance and security requirements.

The key organizational measure to tackle these problems is the establishment of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), also known as the Cloud Competence Center. A CCoE brings together a cross-functional team, including Enterprise Architects, DevOps, CloudOps, Infrastructure, and Business, to form a team that governs and drives the cloud transformation process. The Cloud Center of Excellence ensures that all stakeholders understand not only the cloud technology but also the cultural changes needed for the move to the cloud.

The core task of the CCoE is, therefore, to manage and advance the cloud transformation within the company and act as the central cloud knowledge hub.

In this post, and the following blog post series on the Cloud Center of Excellence, we want to introduce you to the core tasks of the CCoE, according to Gartner. So let’s dive right into these tasks.

Cloud Center of Excellence Core Tasks

1. Plan Cloud Transformation and Strategy

Creating the transformation roadmap is a key activity to align the cloud strategy and investments, maximize cloud benefits, enhance customer experience and minimize business disruption during the transformation. Furthermore, the CCoE typically should outline the scope of the transformation and identify low-hanging-fruits, such as applications that are easy to transform and guarantee a quick return on investment.

Read the full article about Cloud Transformation Planning.

2. Govern Costs and Optimize Cloud Portfolio

Choosing an efficient way to manage, govern, and cost optimize heterogeneous cloud environments and their costs is an key task of the CCoE streamline the cloud usage. This is important during the planning phase, but also after the transformation when operating a hybrid IT landscape. The keyword here is “right-sizing” all services according to their actual consumption.

Read the full article about Governing Costs and Optimizing Cloud Portfolio.

3. Manage and Report Cloud Transformation

The CCoE should always have an overview of the current application and IT infrastructure landscape and its dependencies. Specifically, during the transformation with so many moving parts, it is crucial that the CCoE provides accurate reports of the progress of the cloud transformation. In the initial assessment phase, the CCoE should also report the application landscape’s cloud readiness, identify optimal cloud providers, cloud target architectures and calculate expected migration efforts and costs.

Read the full article about Cloud Transformation Management and Reporting.

4. Enforce Organization-Wide Cloud Transformation Policies

Establishing guidelines and standards for cloud security, compliance and cost control is another key task for the CCoE. When questions regarding these policies arise, the CCoE should be the central point of information. For this to actually work, the CCoE needs full management support.

Read the full article about Enforcing Organization-Wide Cloud Transformation Policies.

5. Act as an Internal Cloud Advisor and Guide

The next essential task of the Cloud Center of Excellence is building a bridge between organizational units and stakeholders that use, measure, and fund the cloud transformation. All of these departments and stakeholders need to be aligned with regard to goals, timelines and budgets. This also includes guiding internal users in their selection process of the right cloud providers, services and migration strategies according to the 6 R's (rehost, replatform, retain, retire, refactor, repurchase).

Read the full article about Acting as an Internal Cloud Advisor and Guide.

6. Keep Up-To-Date with Cloud Technologies

Every day new cloud services are released by the cloud providers for ever more specialized use cases. Tracking these changes is essential to optimize the cloud portfolio and save costs. Since the CCoE acts as an internal cloud service broker and as an advisor for the IT departments, one of the CCoE's core tasks is to advise with regards to the newest services and most appropriate.

Read the full article about Keeping Up-To-Date with Cloud Technologies.

7. Manage Cloud Security and Compliance Risks

Security and regulatory requirements are changing fundamentally due to the cloud. Defining and applying corporate security standards in all aspects of the IT architecture and ongoing operational support is another key task.

Read the full article about Managing Cloud Security and Compliance Risks.

Txture's Support for These CCoE Tasks

Txture is a software platform for the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) of large organizations and all transformation stakeholders who want to speed up the cloud transformation and make the right migration decisions. Our platform supports the end-to-end cloud transformation process from automated application landscape discovery, over cloud readiness assessment and roadmapping to hybrid cloud (cost) optimization. It also acts as a central cloud knowledge and decision hub. This saves you time, money and provides your organization with the competitive advantage of cloud agility that you need.

Read more about the benefits for the Cloud Center of Excellence.

Want to have a look at our Txture tool and catch the real benefit for your CCoE? Book a demo session!