Acting as an Internal Cloud Advisor and Guide

Welcome back to another installment of our Cloud Center of Excellence post series!

In the first post of this series, we presented the core tasks of the Cloud Center of Excellence, also known as the Cloud Competence Center, and the arguments for organizations establishing a dedicated team. If you are unfamiliar with the core tasks of the Cloud Center of Excellence we encourage you to read our article on "The 7 Core Tasks of the Cloud Center of Excellence" first!

In this blog post series, we take a closer look at these seven core tasks and show you how our Cloud Transformation Platform Txture helps the CCoE to perform a faster and cheaper cloud transformation with fewer risks. Let’s have a look at the CCoE’s fifth core task.

Acting as an Internal Cloud Advisor and Guide

As one of the 7 Core Tasks we described in our blog post series, the Cloud Center of Excellence needs to build a bridge between organizational units and stakeholders that initiate and fund the cloud transformation. All of these departments and stakeholders need to be aligned with regard to goals, timelines and budgets. CCOEs should be interdisciplinary and represent the needs and contributions of all project stakeholders. Therefore, the CCOE may tackle challenges from a number of viewpoints thanks to the diversity of your team.

To properly develop such a CCoE Team, you'll need to assign key roles and someone acting as Cloud Advisor and Guide. An Executive, someone in the organization who has the autonomy and power to lead change, may perform this vital responsibility. This leader will encourage additional stakeholders to join the CCoE and act as a catalyst for:

• Finance: Assures that cost control governance and cost-cutting measures are in place to prevent expenses from going off the rails. Architecture: Ascertains that the company has sufficient knowledge, follows best practices, and is capable of developing a future technology plan utilizing the appropriate products.
• Operations: Provides an operational support approach that spans both the new cloud environment and your old legacy infrastructure.
• Security: Establishes and implements corporate security standards in all elements of architecture and continuous operational support.
• Compliance: Ensures that governance policies are in place and that they are audited against regulatory criteria in the cloud environment of choice.

Much of the emphasis of CCoE efforts is on enhancing business agility and speed along the cloud transformation process. However, defining a company's cloud investment in a way that demonstrates the benefit to each business unit assists companies in making better decisions for their customers and themselves.

A CCoE that lacks the data to demonstrate the benefits of cloud investment and the ability to contextualize this knowledge has little chance of success. Regardless of how much education or governance they offer, or what type of measures they put in place, the cloud will appear to be an unnecessary cost in the end. Nonetheless, delving into the value the cloud delivers to the organization and breaking it down by relevant KPIs guarantees that all stakeholders — from engineers to executives — can make long-term business choices.

Central Knowledge Hub

As already discussed, the CCoE is confronted with vast IT environments, dispersed information, and a large set of different internal and external stakeholders. The cloud services market is undergoing steady change, making it difficult to keep up with cost options and technological choice. Assessing the application portfolio for cloud risk, business value, and technical readiness before deciding on migration options is a time-consuming process. Also, communicating the transformation's progress to a broad group of stakeholders is challenging. Still keeping an overview of strategy and goals is crucial to encourage the teams to pull together.

This is where Txture comes in!
Txture provides a central platform for the CCoEs to oversee the whole cloud transition and ongoing modernization process along the entire journey to the cloud.

Txture Cloud Transformation Dashboard

This also entails assisting internal users in their selection of relevant cloud providers and services. It provides a standardized process for IT and application assessments as well as a migration planning and tracking mechanism to assist you in quickly getting your migration journey laid out and started. Txture gives you a comprehensive picture of the migration process and customizable reporting options, so you can make quick choices while keeping your stakeholders informed.

Have a look at our centralized platform, standardized assessment, migration tracking and reporting mechanisms first hand!