OK, so on the surface Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) is another IT industry acronym and buzz phrase. In the cyber security domain the hot one is “zero trust” and in IT Operations it is “AIOps”. Despite the catchy name, there is more to CCoE than marketing hype. As with other disruptive technologies, the move of core business applications to the cloud is not simply a systems and technology shift, it is one that requires a framework of people and process to keep the powerful force from going to the dark side! Our experience at PTP, along with industry data, supports the criticality of implementing a CCoE in order to extract maximum value and the minimum cost with cloud providers.
Leveraging the cloud is about the business determining that it can achieve a competitive advantage in the market through extensive on-demand compute, storage, analytics and automation technologies. It is about unleashing creative and smart DevOps teams to move faster and improve how information can be used to achieve goals. But as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Checks and balances. Let the horses run, but make sure they are going the right direction and executing within policies and budget. The role of the CCoE in this sense is about quality execution and business-appropriate governance. Most IT and business leaders would agree, but evaluating study data is a more concrete approach.
- Have a CCoE, a group that has CCoE responsibilities, or a plan to create one – up from 75% in 2017 85%
- Those with a CCoE say they have benefited 99%
- Report better overall operational efficiency 59%
- Say they do a good job managing cloud usage and costs 30%
- Agree tools are important to the success of a CCoE 100%
- Companies track or manage their cloud usage but still do not feel confident that they are effectively using these measurements 64%
Key Data Points
PTP’s technology partner, Cloudcheckr, conducted an analysis regarding the implementation and use of a CCoE along with questions around operational and financial considerations. The graphic to the left illustrates several significant responses – – the most alarming of which is that only 30% of those that responded say that do a good job managing cloud usage and costs. Notice I used the word alarming and not surprising. Alarming because the opportunity for runaway costs are high when the access to services and increased capacity is only a click away. Not surprising because the process requires the right visibility tools, the discipline to analyze the data, to make recommendations and then to implement them. With a CCoE, the DevOps team does not have to slow down their progress to ensure they are staying within budget, that is part of the CCoE charter. Also worth noting that 99% of those organizations that have implemented some type of CCoE have benefited. In order to achieve a result this high I would presume that the organizations that have invested in their resources to participate in the CCoE use it for true governance and business enablement, not for policing or delaying progress.
PTP’s Role in the CCoE
The PeakPlus team at PTP provides services to participate in an organization’s CCoE, or if not direct participation with our cloud experts, to instead provide visibility through our cloud management tools and reporting with recommendations. The team analyzes resource utilization from month to month, spend and savings opportunities, right-sizing resource opportunities, and analysis of idle resources. In addition to this data, the team analyzes cloud security configuration best practices, filtering through alerts on configurations, prioritizing them to those that pose the greatest data security risk, and discussing how to remediate with our customer. PTP has the expertise to provide the remediation on our customer’s behalf if requested and needed. The chart above is actual data from a PTP customer who, with the data provided to their CCoE by PTP, was able to realize a 40% reduction in their AWS spend in just two months!
Leveraging a CCoE and investing the time of the resources involved is for organizations who recognize they can execute IT projects faster leveraging cloud resources, that it is an important part of their business strategy, and as such, requires the appropriate company oversight to achieve maximum value. PTP can play a part in this process, and we are confident our efforts will yield the results you need. We would be happy to show you with a free trial of our reporting, at no cost.