Cloud Center of Excellence

Definition and Purpose

A CCoE is a centralized governance function designed to lead and manage cloud adoption across an organization. It acts as a consultative body for central IT, business-unit IT, and cloud service consumers, ensuring that cloud initiatives align with overall business objectives.

Key Responsibilities

The CCoE is responsible for:

• Setting cloud policies and governance standards
• Guiding cloud provider selection and solution architecture
• Assisting with workload placement and risk management
• Promoting best practices and knowledge sharing across the organization

Assessing Cloud Adoption Readiness

Before establishing a CCoE, evaluate your current cloud adoption status and readiness. This process includes:

• Understanding existing cloud usage and spending
• Identifying gaps in skills, governance, and processes
• Recognizing the need for a structured approach to cloud transformation

Asking the Right Questions

Organizations often face challenges in cloud adoption, such as:

• How to develop and enforce organization-wide cloud policies that allow flexibility while managing risks
• How to guide internal users in selecting appropriate cloud services
• How to manage security and regulatory compliance risks
• How to govern costs and forecast future expenditures
• How to promote awareness of cloud best practices and innovations

Defining the Structure

The CCoE should be a cross-functional team that includes members from various departments such as IT, finance, compliance, and business units. This diverse representation ensures that all perspectives are considered in cloud decision-making.

Core Pillars of the CCoE

The CCoE operates on three core pillars:

1. Governance: Create policies collaboratively with a cross-functional team and select governance tools for financial and risk management.
2. Brokerage: Assist users in selecting cloud services, architecting cloud solutions, and collaborating with sourcing teams for contract negotiation.
3. Community: Raise cloud knowledge within the organization and disseminate best practices through training events, knowledge bases, and outreach efforts.

Building Relationships

The CCoE must engage with stakeholders across the organization to build trust and collaboration. This can be achieved by:

• Hosting workshops and training sessions to educate stakeholders on cloud benefits and best practices.
• Establishing open lines of communication for feedback and suggestions.

Creating Advisory Councils

Forming a cross-functional cloud computing advisory council can help shape and enforce cloud-related policies and influence organizational change. This council should include representatives from various departments to ensure comprehensive input.

Develop Cloud Policies

The CCoE should focus on creating clear and flexible cloud policies that guide cloud usage while minimizing risks. These policies should be regularly reviewed and updated based on feedback and changing business needs.

Promoting Continuous Learning

The CCoE should foster a culture of continuous learning by:

• Providing ongoing training and resources for employees
• Creating a knowledge base that captures lessons learned and best practices

Defining Metrics

Establish clear metrics to assess the effectiveness of the CCoE and its initiatives. These metrics might include:

• The number of successful cloud projects initiated
• Cost savings achieved through cloud adoption
• User satisfaction and engagement levels

Continuous Improvement

Regularly review the CCoE’s performance against established metrics and make adjustments as needed. This iterative approach ensures that the CCoE remains relevant and effective in driving cloud adoption.

Overcoming Resistance

The CCoE should anticipate resistance to cloud adoption and proactively address concerns by:

• Clearly communicating the benefits of cloud technologies
• Providing support and resources to help teams transition smoothly

Ensuring Adaptability

The CCoE must remain adaptable to changing business needs and technological advancements. This flexibility lets you embrace incremental changes and continuously improve your cloud strategy.

The following information identifies the key roles from your organization to include in your CCoE and their responsibilities. We recommend that you identify the names of individuals who are responsible for each function.

A CCoE is essential for organizations looking to adopt Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) efficiently and effectively. By establishing a CCoE, you can leverage a structured, technical approach to cloud adoption that aligns with your business goals and ensures successful outcomes.

The CCoE brings together cross-functional teams, including executive sponsors, key stakeholders, and highly skilled technical experts in areas such as cloud architecture, DevOps, security, and compliance. This multidisciplinary team oversees the entire cloud initiative, ensuring that OCI adoption adheres to best practices and industry standards.

The CCoE leads the organizational change management process, developing workforce readiness plans that focus on upskilling employees in OCI technologies, including Terraform, Ansible, and the OCI Software Development Kit (SDK). It serves as a steering committee for defining cloud standards, such as resource tagging, cost tracking, and security controls, ensuring consistent governance across OCI Compute and Networking services, in addition to OCI storage services.

The CCoE also manages the cloud adoption roadmap, tracking feature requests and responding to escalations to optimize OCI usage and cost efficiency.

By creating dedicated teams, or sub-CCOEs, for specific OCI services or use cases, you can effect platform-specific optimization while maintaining a common cloud adoption strategy defined by the central CCoE. With the CCoE's technical guidance and expertise, you can effectively navigate the challenges of OCI adoption and leverage the benefits of advanced services such as Oracle Autonomous Database, Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), and OCI Resource Manager, ultimately driving innovation and competitive advantage.

Using a CCoE is critical for organizations who want to implement an effective multicloud strategy, particularly when integrating OCI with other major cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The CCoE plays an important role in orchestrating the interconnectivity between these environments, such as the Oracle Interconnect for Azure, which allows for seamless data transfer and workload management between OCI and Azure, and the Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud, facilitating similar integration with GCP.

By establishing governance frameworks and best practices, the CCoE ensures that Oracle Database services deployed and managed on Azure are optimized for performance and compliance, while also managing security protocols to protect sensitive data across multiple platforms.

The CCoE is responsible for guiding the selection of cloud services and providers, ensuring that Oracle Database@Azure, Oracle Database Service for Azure, and MySQL HeatWave on AWS are aligned with organizational needs and workload requirements.

Additionally, it assists in architecting solutions that use the strengths of each cloud provider, enabling a hybrid approach that maximizes resource utilization and minimizes latency.

By fostering collaboration among technical teams, the CCoE enhances cloud fluency and promotes a culture of continuous improvement, helping to ensure your organization remains agile and responsive to evolving cloud technologies and business demands.

This strategic oversight not only effects successful multicloud adoption but also positions you to capitalize on the unique capabilities offered by each cloud provider, ultimately leading to enhanced operational efficiency and innovation.

After you build your CCoE team and your infrastructure, it's a best practice to use cloud applications such as Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud, which helps you to model and plan across finance, HR, supply chain, and sales, and to streamline the financial close process and make better decisions. To ensure success, use the Checklist for Creating an EPM Center of Excellence.