How A Cloud Center Of Excellence Can Transform Your Enterprise

Innovation How A Cloud Center Of Excellence Can Transform Your Enterprise Shai Morag Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Jun 21, 2022, 06:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin CEO and co-founder of Ermetic , a provider of public cloud security technology for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud infrastructures.

getty Cloud computing is no longer relegated to early adopters and risk-takers. Today, it serves as a necessary foundation for successful IT and business. Yet, as organizations expand their cloud presence—including increasingly complex multicloud environments—the challenges related to managing, optimizing, orchestrating and securing them grow.

As a result, organizations are exploring ways to establish a formal framework to guide them on the cloud journey—and boost security. One method that’s attracting attention is the cloud center of excellence (CCOE). The idea is relatively straightforward—the goal is to optimize performance, better manage costs and ratchet up security.

In addition, a CCOE can help companies address a shortage of cloud expertise within their security teams by upskilling staff in a variety of disciplines on cloud technology while maintaining a high level of software and security excellence along the way. The CCOE Defined That being said, executing a CCOE strategy can prove challenging. A key step toward achieving a best-in-class cloud framework is to understand what exactly a cloud center of excellence is and why it matters to your organization’s security.

Although there’s no strict definition, one Gartner analyst describes a CCOE as “a centralized enterprise architecture function that leads and governs cloud computing adoption within an organization. ” Furthermore, this environment “provides central IT with a way to execute the organization’s cloud strategy, enable the business to choose the best solutions, provide governance through policies and cloud management tools, and uplevel skills and foster discovery and distribution of best practices. ” The benefits extend into several important areas, including the ability to automate common tasks, improve structure and consistency, speed deployments and minimize errors and problems.

The CCOE approach can also help reduce menial tasks, cut down on maintenance, boost security and, ultimately, instill a greater sense of stability. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Of course, achieving success in the CCOE arena requires change. This framework touches a broad array of areas, including business requirements, data protection and governance and internal skill sets.

As a result, there’s a need to adopt new technologies and help developers, DevOps teams and others understand how to leverage the full power of a CCOE. In the cloud, security responsibilities shift to overseeing the environment posture, defining policies and guardrails, providing guidance and best practices, educating groups—including developers and DevOps teams—and moving beyond an ad hoc and case-by-case reactive framework. A Strategic Approach For CCOE Formulating an effective strategy and building in the right set of cloud and security controls requires input from stakeholders across the organization.

As data management and security extend deeper into an enterprise—and even outward to partners and other third parties—a collaborative and cooperative approach is imperative. Key stakeholders typically include a cloud economist, cloud operations manager and cloud security architect. However, there’s also a need for engineering teams, developers, enterprise architects and various lines of business leaders, including CSOs and CISOs, to play a support role.

Together, everyone defines the various systems, frameworks and rules that will establish a CCOE and guide the business forward. As an organization develops a common framework and defines best practices and guardrails, the CCOE initiative takes shape. At this point, it’s necessary to assign ownership and deploy tools for measuring and acting on results.

Further discussions typically focus on reviewing security findings, discussing details and resolving issues as they arise. Although IT leadership is the primary stakeholder in any CCOE project, equally important is the support of line-of-business, finance and operations executives, as agility and time-to-market are key benefits that these functional leaders have a vested interest in making a reality. Also, because developers and DevOps teams are responsible for deploying infrastructure in the cloud, they must play an integral role in shifting security left.

Not surprisingly, the technology needed to manage a CCOE is critical. This includes software that delivers a centralized view of inventory and visibility across multicloud assets, as well as a prioritized view of the risks. Ideally, the software should also provide the ability to filter data by criteria such as account, groups of accounts and policies and offer automated remediation and ticketing with links to information technology service management (ITSM).

Into The Clouds To build an effective CCOE framework, focus on these four steps: 1. Modernize IT systems for agility so they’re capable of adapting and supporting evolving business requirements. 2.

Implement deployment configurations that are repeatable and align with security, compliance and management policies. 3. Establish a formal review and approval process for selecting cloud-native tools.

4. Standardize commonly used platform components over time using automation. Make no mistake, a CCOE delivers a best practice framework that pays dividends and helps better secure an enterprise.

It helps organizations advance cloud initiatives faster, smarter and in a more secure way. When it’s used effectively, CCOE accelerates agility, flexibility and innovation. With a focus on people, processes and technology—and with guardrails firmly in place—an organization can adopt a CCOE model that pays dividends now but also helps future-proof cloud investments and security.

The result is a more agile and flexible framework that’s designed for digital success. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify? Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn .

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