Cloud Center of Excellence

Many ways of working have already been sustainably modernized. At the same time, employees' expectations of the applications they use are rising. In order for companies to reap the benefits of cloud transformation, such as greater flexibility and efficiency, the next step must now follow: making the business and specialist applications usable via the cloud so that there are no delays in the work processes. One example: Business-critical contract conclusions or offers should also be sent smoothly and immediately to customers from the home office. Who can and wants to put off their customers until the next day just because a template is not available remotely? This is where a comprehensive cloud transformation creates lean processes, high availability and always up-to-date applications.  

For IT departments, the transformation to the cloud enterprise of the future brings some challenges that should be solved competently. Because they are not only busy with the migration, the management of the cloud services and new developments. The existing applications and infrastructure also want to be operated. 

External management and technology consulting professionals are there to support them with their know-how in every phase of the cloud transformation. An important milestone is the early establishment of the necessary core competencies for the subsequent operation of the infrastructure, ideally in a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE).  

How can these tasks be solved and the applications provided at the desired speed and quality? Regular structures and processes often fail to do this - so an alternative is needed. 

In a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), experts from different areas can work together to overcome existing line-of-business assignments and thus significantly accelerate coordination processes. The goal is to achieve business and technical agility. This applies to all phases: in the course of cloud introduction, during increasing cloud automation and for the period after cloud transformation. Evaluation criteria such as cost, flexibility, complexity and speed are at the heart of operational and also development issues.  

The CCoE makes a significant contribution to overcoming existing structures and silos and working together in an interdisciplinary manner to involve as many company divisions as possible for a paradigm shift towards cloud-based architectures. The way of working is comparable with the DevOps approach. 

Experts for cloud application development are bundled in the CCoE - requirements engineers can record and design requirements with the specialist departments based on available technologies. Technology experts from the CCoE can be integrated and provide support for the corresponding release processes - specialists for operation and support can also be found in a well-positioned CCoE. They guarantee the secure operation of the solutions provided. These profiles primarily address the requirement to position IT as a partner to the business for the provision of modern solutions. The CCoE continues to be supplemented by professionals for the basic implementation, governance and operation of required base platforms (e.g., Azure) that ensure long-term use. 

External partners can help companies pool knowledge here and initiate cloud competencies for long-term continuous improvement and future change. In practice, it has been shown that companies can quickly build knowledge in mixed teams between external partners and their own resources and then adopt it independently. 

A major advantage of the CCoE is that a Cloud Center of Excellence enables IT managers to scale much faster. In this way, companies quickly build up expertise in cloud technologies in a team, before it is a question of transferring the initiated processes to the line in a further downstream step.