How to Create a Cloud Centre of Excellence in Your Organisation

What Is a Cloud Centre of Excellence?

In order to drive your Local Authority’s digital strategy forward and deliver more cost effective resident services, it’s important to establish that the appropriate skills and structure are in place. This is where a cloud centre of excellence comes in. A cloud centre of excellence is essentially a governance function that unites your IT teams with key stakeholders within your organisation.

The ultimate aim is to improve digital transformation outcomes by overseeing cloud management while engaging with the wider organisation. Its specific responsibilities include (but are not limited to):

• Setting cloud policy
• Guiding provider selection
• Assisting with solution architecture
• Defining workload placement

It’s important to note, however, that your centre of excellence should not be involved in project management or business as usual operational requirements.

The Benefits of Adopting a Cloud Centre of Excellence

By implementing governance controls through a cloud centre of excellence, your organisation can realise a number of benefits that align to some of the most pressing challenges facing IT Managers today:

• Develop and enforce flexible cloud computing policies while reducing risk
• Select the right cloud providers and reduce third-party risk
• Reduce the risk of data breach and ensure your data’s confidentiality, integrity and availability
• Govern and forecast costs
• Keep up-to-date with technology and cloud capabilities as they evolve
• Promote cloud as the answer to a vast array of organisational challenges

With such compelling benefits, it’s clear that many organisations should consider implementing a centre of excellence. However, we understand there are challenges in creating a cloud centre of excellence in Local Authorities that may not have a large enough team or the resources to facilitate it. Is there another way to establish a cloud centre of excellence at your organisation?

Establish Your Own Centre of Excellence

At Six Degrees, we have established our own cloud centre of excellence to ensure we keep our finger on the pulse of cloud technology and can extend this to our customers. In doing so, we have ensured our business – and our customers – have access to extensive skills and knowledge. If you are thinking of establishing your own cloud centre of excellence, you should consider the following three pillars to define the structure of the function:

• Through governance, the function will create policies and select tools to manage financial and risk implications.
• Through brokerage, the function will assist in selecting cloud partners and negotiating with them through robust vendor management.
• Through community, the function will raise cloud awareness throughout the entire organisation and ensure best practices are maintained at all times.

But don’t worry if this is something you can’t resource internally; you can join our cloud centre of excellence and our Cloud Champions can bring you into the fold for you to reap the benefits of ours. Our people have access to the latest training, and we empower them by fostering a culture of diversity, inclusivity and mental wellbeing that brings out the best in all of our people. You can benefit from working collaboratively with this team, too.

By partnering with Six Degrees, we extend our positive values into your organisation to ensure you gain the maximum value from your cloud investment. To learn more about our industry-leading secure cloud capabilities, schedule a call and speak to one of our Cloud Champions.