Day Two Cloud 098: Cloud Centers Of Excellence – Should You Have One?

A cloud center of excellence is…a committee. But before you turn away in disgust or despair, today’s Day Two Cloud episode makes the case for having this kind of working group in your organization. Why? Because a fractured cloud strategy causes organizational headaches. Duplicated services, unnecessary costs, poor security controls, and other problems can arise without a coherent approach. A cloud center of excellence can reduce headaches. The purpose of a cloud center of excellence is to: Discuss, agree on, and document best practices and frameworks for using cloud services Socialize and champion these frameworks to drive their adoption throughout the organization Oversee and handle exceptions, approve them as exceptions, or amend the best practices accordingly Our guest and guide to cloud centers of excellence is Fred Chagnon, Principal Research Director, Service Provider Sector at Info-Tech Research Group. We discuss: * The purpose and goals of a cloud center of excellence (CCoE) * Whether a CCoE is right for your organization * Which stakeholders to include * Using CCoEs to share hard-won knowledge * The nuances of best practices, policies, and standards * Championing best practices vs. policing them * The risks of not having a CCoE * The lifecycle of a CCoE Takeaways: If your IT is centralized, you don’t need a CCoE, but you should still be doing All the Things. Setting guiding principles, socializing adoption, evaluating exceptions. It just tends to flow a little more naturally when IT is not dispersed. You know you need a CCoE when you have like-minded colleagues in other business units working on problems you’ve already solved. Or who have already solved problems you are now solving. Sponsor: CBT Nuggets CBT Nuggets is IT training for IT professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills. If you want to make fully operational your networking, security, cloud, automation, or DevOps battle station visit cbtnuggets.com/cloud. Show Links: @fredchagnon – Fred on Twitter Datanauts 094: Choosing Your Next Infrastructure – Packet Pushers Fred Chagnon’s Packet Pushers blogs Transcript: [00:00:00.240] – Ethan [AD] Sponsor CBT Nuggets, is IT training for I.T. professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills, if you want to make fully operational your networking cloud security automation or DevOps Battle Station, visit CBT nuggets, dotcom cloud. That’s CBT nuggets. Dotcom cloud. [/AD] [00:00:23.860] – Ethan Welcome to Day Two Cloud. And today we are talking about cloud centers of excellence. What does that mean? Is that just like we get together and bring donuts and talk about cloud and but we do it in an excellent way, whether there’s more to the story than that, isn’t there Ned? [00:00:39.650] – Ned It’s not exactly Bill and Ted’s bogus cloud center of excellence, but there’s a lot more to it when it comes to what it actually is and how it moves an organization forward. We got some really amazing insight from from our guest, Fred, whose last name I’m not going to attempt because it’s very French Canadian and I don’t want to offend. But he gives us some great insight on what the cloud center of exce...