5 tips for creating a cloud center of excellence

Even as cloud spend is set to grow at a CAGR of 16.9% and surpass $1.3 trillion by 2025, the transformation journey is riddled with challenges, such as security, governance, compliance, economics, and resourcing. A cloud center of excellence (CoE) in an enterprise can make a big difference in the return on cloud investments.

Cloud CoE adoption has increased from 69% in 2017 to 82% in 2021, demonstrating its role in value creation. To work effectively, CoE transformation must rest on four key pillars — innovation, advocacy, scale, and governance — that can accelerate cloud adoption throughout an enterprise.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Besides technology expertise and contextual knowledge, every successful cloud CoE revolves around these five tenets:

• Being relevant: A cloud CoE must stay relevant by bringing a convergence between the long-term objectives (top-down) and immediate priorities (bottom-up), leading to a strong foundation that supports future strategy and mitigates risk and rework.
• Staying connected: A cloud CoE must seek representation and involvement from across the business to improve buy-in and compliance.
• Building a strong team: Various skills, ranging from cloud experts to business specialists, are required for the effective functioning of cloud CoE.
• Innovating continuously: A cloud CoE must invest time and resources to identify digital capabilities to innovate and build ecosystems of the future.
• Transforming culture: A cloud CoE must engage the security and risk groups within an organization to understand the hybrid landscape and ensure the identification and mitigation of risks.

Learn more about cloud-driven business agility on Microsoft Cloud with this case study from TCS.