For companies across the globe, especially enterprise-level organisations, cloud adoption is a crucial aspect of digital transformation efforts. And to help ensure that cloud adoption — as well as cloud management and optimisation — is successful, there’s the Cloud Centre of Excellence.

But what is a Cloud Centre of Excellence, or CCoE, exactly? How does an organisation go about building a Cloud Centre of Excellence? And, perhaps most importantly, what are the short-, medium-, and long-term benefits of a CCoE in the first place?

Speaking to a crowded hall of attendees at DIGIT’s 2023 Cloud First Summit in Edinburgh, Alex Radu — who’s JPMorgan Chase’s VP Product Adoption Lead, Cloud CoE — discussed and answered these very questions.

To better understand the Cloud Centre of Excellence, its benefits, and how to go about building one within your organisation, here’s a general rundown of Radu’s talk alongside some of her helpful, actionable suggestions.

A Cloud Centre of What?

“I thought really long and hard about how I could explain this, so anyone could understand it — whether you do have a CCoE in your company, whether you don’t, or whether you’re thinking about starting one,” Radu explained. And, like all great speakers at technology conferences, she simplified a somewhat complex concept by using a Star Wars analogy.

“People often see the CCoE as the most sage of the Jedis — Yoda. They think it’s the be-all, the do-all, the end-all of your cloud organisation. They also sometimes think it’s only for experts, because it’s the ‘Centre of Excellence’ […] and that it’s there to be the central governance or control entity. That couldn’t be further away from the truth,” she prefaced.

“Instead, it’s more like the Alliance: it should be more like a joint alliance of people who are there to support, enable, and further your cloud goals or strategy,” explained Radu. “They should be there to streamline and improve how you adopt and migrate to cloud.”

As a small aside, Radu noted that a CCoE isn’t always called a CCoE: “the CCoE is called a lot of different things — it might be a ‘Centre of Cloud Knowledge,’ it might be ‘Cloud Champions’; people have different names for it,” she mentioned.

Whichever name or acronym is used, Radu re-confirmed that “ultimately, it’s about bringing the people that can help and know most about cloud in your organisation together to make informed strategic decisions about your cloud future.”

The Real-world Benefits of CCoEs

To illustrate just how advantageous Cloud Centres of Excellence can be, Radu discussed a selection of real-world benefits during her talk — and the below examples are just a handful from that selection.

For instance, one notable benefit Radu cited is that the CCoE helps organisations to be more holistic when it comes to the new products and services or features that it wants to use, with the CCoE helping oversee which service best meets the needs of all the organiation’s teams and which service makes most financial sense.

Speaking of financial sense, another advantage that Radu mentioned is the inherent visibility over things like cloud-based organisation accounts. “If you have that visibility across your organisation, and you have a central point where it can all come to, it can actually help you save money. Yes, the cloud can save money, but only if you do it right,” she noted.

One more substantial benefit of CCoEs relates to compliance and security. “Again, if you’re vending accounts from a central place, you can then create security guardrails, where it can actually help you terminate some instances; like if you have a password rotation policy, it can help you actually monitor those risks and remediate those risks without the application teams having to do anything,” she explained.

“But,” as Radu punctuated and rightly pointed out, “you need to have a central organisation actually looking at those things and implementing them.”

Considering the Right Structure for Your CCoE

For those interested in reaping the benefits of a CCoE themselves, Radu had an important point to make: it’s crucial to recognise that, when it comes to thinking about and then building a CCoE, what works for another company may not necessarily work for yours.

“There is no one-size-fits-all,” she said. “There are frameworks, there are ideas, there are ways you can implement it, but ultimately, it will only work if you do the work, and you should discover what works for you in doing that work.

“That implies looking at where you are in your migration journey or your adoption journey; how mature the organisation is; how big the organisation is; what type of skills you have and people you have; what type of people you need to bring together; and how you can structure your CCoE or your cloud organisation going forward.”

As Radu mentioned, considering CCoE structure — i.e. how your Centre is set up — is an essential step in getting CCoE efforts right. And to help with this, Radu provided a broad overview of the most prevalent CCoE structures, including the centralised, decentralised, and semi-centralised organisational structures.

On the centralised structure, she said that is usually “works for smaller businesses where you don’t have that many organisational units or teams, and you can actually have just one central organisation that will be your CCoE to inform […] your architectures, your governance, your guardrails, your FinOps practices, optimisations.”

“Now, if you are a bigger company, you might look at a decentralised model, where you have a CCoE embedded to each of your organisational units,” Radu advised. “That means you gain that advantage of knowing exactly what your teams need, knowing exactly what you need to build for them to use cloud in the most effective way.”

However, the decentralised structure isn’t without its downsides. “At the same time, you don’t really have that connectivity between the different CCoEs to drive that holistic, enterprise vision and strategy,” she noted. “So everyone’s doing things in their own way, and sometimes doing the same things, but no one talks to each other, so you don’t actually know.”

To bridge the potential pain points of the decentralised approach, there’s the semi-centralised structure. This particular structure is where “you have a cloud cell — which is like your own CCoE organisation with your organisational unit — but then you then have a central CCoE that brings them all together.”

As Radu clarified, it’s “really good in really big companies, because you not only have the individual cells meeting the needs of your teams in those organisations, but you also bring them all together to learn from each other, share, build better frameworks, build better guardrails together, and making sure that they’re all leveraging the best information that they have. This is what we [JPMorgan Chase] use.”

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Thinking About the CCoE Team (Or, Alliance)

People are undeniably at both the heart and the brain of any Cloud Centre of Excellence. But what does a CCoE team look like, exactly?

To illustrate, and using the example of a CCoE team operating in semi-centralised structure, Radu suggested that you can “have your central CCoE team that’s mainly there for the strategy, governance structure side to steer everyone to steer the ship together.

“But then in your cloud cells, you can actually have some different types of roles. And that could be things like compliance, it might be things like security, Information Security Managers; you might have FinOps Managers that look at your cost optimisation and your spending; you might have your adoption and engagement side of your team; you also might have the Cloud Platform Engineers.”

The variety of people in the CCoE is an aspect that Radu specifically wanted to draw attention to, emphasising the fact that it takes myriad people with a whole host of skills to make a CCoE work.

“Not everyone in a Cloud Centre of Excellence will be a Cloud Engineer, or a cloud engineering expert; not everyone will be a cloud veteran,” Radu stressed. “There are a lot of other people that are really good at a lot of other things — like security, like financials […] a lot of other training, learning. They’re not just cloud, but they are all focused on cloud.”

That said, the people that you do bring into the CCoE need to yield particular traits, because “for someone to decide to be an enabler and decide to spend your time driving others to adopt or migrate to cloud, they do need to be a certain type of person.”

As outlined in one of Radu’s slides, the traits in question include having a growth mindset, being innovative, resilient, and result- and outcome-driven, good at relationship building and influencing, as well as being empathetic and customer-centric.

Radu wholly acknowledged that “people like this are really hard to come by,” and that training people to help grow into such traits is a surefire way to ensure that your CCoE has what it needs to be a successful endeavour.

Building Your Cloud Centre of Excellence

After giving an overview of some of the CCoE’s most important aspects, Radu supplied five steps for getting to work and actually building out your organisation’s own Cloud Centre of Excellence.

“The first part — and this is the hardest,” she said candidly, “is getting the data and understanding what it is that you’re trying to build with your CCoE. What is it that you’re actually trying to get from it? And why do you need it? Because if you don’t know why you want it, you’re probably not going to build it very well.”

The second step concerns leadership buy-in, and the need to explicitly show how a CCoE will support your company’s cloud efforts. “This is a tricky one — you need to have leadership that believes in your idea and you,” said Radu. “You can also go in and show them and demonstrate to them how this would help you,” but “if you don’t have a strong case, they will just dismiss it.”

Thirdly, it’s getting a strong and diverse team together. “Again, it doesn’t have to be new people […] but it’s all about getting them to talk to each other and getting them to work together to improve what you already do in cloud,” she explained.

The fourth step — or steps — meanwhile, concerns setting up the environment, processes, governance, and compliance. “The next steps […] are actually starting to implement these in real life, in your environment and in your infrastructure.”

Finally, the fifth step is “to start reusing, reorganising, and enabling. So basically, using all of that expertise, all of those people together to actually start contributing and leveraging each other’s knowledge and experience,” she said. This is, after all, what the previous efforts have led up to — and will help to bring about cloud excellence going forward.

Cloud Excellence in Your Organisation

Having a Centre of Cloud Excellence, then, is an undeniably useful way to align knowledge, skills, and resources amid the shifting sands of a company’s cloud adoption and subsequent consumption. And hopefully, due to Radu’s talk and/or this rundown, you’ve been inspired to start your organisation’s very own cloud-focused Alliance.