Diving into Cloud strategy: Cloud Center of Excellence

Business case

A Global Technology & Managed Services Giant was looking to migrate a legacy system to Cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS). R Systems is an AWS Advance Partner for technology and consulting businesses, leveraging AWS to build solutions and services for customers.

Solution

The strategy was to re-architect and migrate the existing solution to ripe the benefits of AWS native cloud services. But this was possible because we already had implemented a cloud dedicated team to handle this process. It is called a Cloud Center of Excellence.

What is a CCoE?

According to the Cloud Management Report 2017, a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) is a cross-functional team of people responsible for developing and managing the cloud strategy, governance, and best practices that the rest of the organization can leverage to transform the business using the cloud. The CCoE leads the organization in cloud adoption, migration, and operations.

Building the Team

This multidisciplinary team’s goal is to manage cloud knowledge and learning. By developing the right practices, frameworks, tools they ensure an accelerated and sustainable cloud migration & adoption across the company.

The CCoE team should have a skill set plan and a role plan. Some of the main roles should include engineers for cloud, infrastructure, operations and security that will design the cloud infrastructure and build reusable patterns and reference architectures, set up automations and define KPI’s for reporting.

CCoE Framework

Why is it important? AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) Action Plans help you prepare for the transition to cloud based IT. AWS CAF is structured into six areas of focus, called perspectives: Business, People, and Governance Perspectives which focus on business capabilities; Platform, Security, and Operations Perspectives which focus on technical capabilities.

Applying the AWS CAF in your organization results in an actionable plan with defined work streams that can guide your organization’s path to cloud adoption.

The leverage of CCoE

• The ability to realize the full potential of the cloud as it eases the execution of cloud migration strategies;
• A Cloud Center of Excellence will handle the entire cloud life cycle—from designing the ecosystem, managing security, ensuring compliance, cybersecurity and ongoing support;
• It reduces operating costs;
• It enables value at every level by focusing a very complex activity in one department. The top reported benefits of a CCoE include reducing security risks (56%), reducing costs (50%) and improving the ability to be agile and innovative (44%) (Cloud Management Report 2017).

1. We managed to execute an adaptable and scalable solution;
2. We replaced legacy services with AWS-native services;
3. We implemented container-based Microservices on AWS;
4. Drive down energy and space costs.

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