A low barrier to entry is one of the great advantages of Microsoft cloud technology—but this can also present a huge challenge. This is why it’s crucial to build a solid Cloud Center of Excellence. In this article, we’ll share some effective practices to help you do just that.
Thanks to their pay-as-you-use pricing models, simple implementation, and lack of hardware requirements, deploying cloud products is a cinch compared to rolling out on-premises software. And with cloud services on the market for just about every business need across every department, teams can quickly and easily procure tools that help them do more.
The more users that can benefit from smarter, connected technologies, the more innovative and efficient businesses can be. But the democratization of cloud tech also opens the door to complications, particularly in larger organizations.
Without a central governing body, things can get chaotic, fast. And when you’re dealing with customer data and cyber security threats, the stakes are incredibly high. The best way to ensure you have oversight on your cloud implementation, and to maximize consistency, security, and value throughout your cloud journey, is to create a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE).
What is a Cloud Center of Excellence?
A CCOE is a team of knowledgeable people from across the business who consult and advise on your cloud environment, as well as the policies that govern it. Gartner describes the CCOE as “the best-practice approach to drive cloud-enabled transformation”. What your CCOE is not, however, is your hands-on cloud team that handles the day-to-day administration and development of your Microsoft cloud stack.
Think of your CCOE more like a council of professionals, who come together to discuss the big-picture and steer the direction of cloud use and governance.
To quote Gartner, a CCOE “doesn’t have day-to-day operational responsibilities, nor is it a project management organization”. It’ll be comprised of multidisciplinary experts from both the IT and the commercial branches of the company, representing all interests and ensuring the team’s work aligns with business objectives.
It might also make decisions on which products and vendors to go with, set overall goals for cloud adoption or migration, and work out how to mitigate the risks involved with taking processes online. Whether you’re deploying Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, or any other Microsoft cloud service, the overarching goal of the CCOE is to maximize its effectiveness. Because implementing a cloud product does not a digital transformation make; fully exploiting the power of the cloud requires cultural, organizational change.
If you’re ready to get started, we’ve pulled together some useful best practices for assembling your own Microsoft Cloud Center of Excellence at scale.
Best practices for assembling your own Microsoft Cloud Center of Excellence at scale
#1: Focus on key Cloud Center of Excellence roles first
Cloud technology moves fast. For your CCOE to be effective, it needs to be as agile and scalable as your cloud platform itself. That means you might need to flex it over time, adding new roles, additional members with new specialisms, or replacing members whose involvement is no longer needed due to changing priorities.
But consistency is important; to ride out this constant change, you need a few core people within your CCOE who can ensure cohesiveness and continuity of knowledge throughout your cloud journey.
The exact size and structure of your CCOE will depend on the scale of your organization and your levels of cloud maturity, but whatever the initial scope, it’s a good idea to start by focusing on key roles that will be the foundation of your team. Once you have these pillars in place, you’ll have the right structure in place to support your CCOE as it scales up.
Remember, it’s vital to have all stakeholders represented, but the smaller the team, the better it will be able to communicate and share ideas. You want to have experts from all areas of the business that your cloud strategy touches, so that you can tackle issues from the full range of perspectives. Having all departments at the table is also useful for disseminating best practices, winning buy-in, and ensuring the clarity and constancy of your cloud messaging.
The two core aspects of your CCOE will be your technical experts, and your business leaders. Your tech experts will be the top brains of your IT team, solution-driven and bringing with them extensive experience in areas like architecture, operations, and security. These team members could hold positions including Software Architect, Site Reliability Engineer, Network or Security Engineer, for example.
In the business corner, you’ll have leaders from traditional enterprise divisions such as finance, governance, and change management. These team members will be your long-term thinkers who know the business and its commercial interests inside-out and understand the business-wide impact that cloud transformation can make.
The CCOE should be highly collaborative and consultative, but for ease of operation, it could also be worth appointing members to roles such as CCOE Lead and Operations and Infrastructure Lead to oversee the general running of the team. But with salaries on the rise, how can you ensure access to the best talent on the market?
How to make open roles more attractive to candidates (without breaking the bank)?
With salaries on the rise, we asked Microsoft MVP, Certified Trainer, Azure Solution Architect, and long-time Microsoft expert Stefano Demiliani to share his views on how to make open roles more attractive to candidates, without having to spend big. Here’s what he had to say.
“Attracting skilled Microsoft professionals is a lot harder than it used to be, demand is high and there is a real bottleneck of talent, so there are fewer skilled people on the open market. While salary is obviously important, it’s no longer the only deciding factor for a candidate looking for a new role. If you’re trying to make a role look more attractive to a Microsoft professional, there are three things I highly recommend every organization try.
1. Offer candidates the opportunity to increase their knowledge and skillset
I always recommend including discourse around Learning and Development in your job postings, and—obviously—that you then follow through! Will your open role allow a candidate to improve their skills in a particular technology, or get a better understanding of how to work as a Consultant? If so, you need to communicate that to candidates at the earliest possible stage. Offering employees the chance to reskill into higher bill-rate technologies can be an incredibly effective way to retain your best talent.
2. Offer progression, and see it through
From personal experience, I can tell you that working for a Microsoft partner or end-user that allows to truly develop and grow your career with them is a huge draw, in terms of considering whether or not to accept a new role. Don’t underestimate how important career development is for professionals seeking a spot in a new Microsoft team.
3. Offer flexible or remote working
2020 proved that people can—by and large—work effectively from home. While there are always going to be some organizations that need people on-site, for specific reasons, know that this will mean you’re swimming upstream in the talent market. However, if you are unable to provide a remote working offering, flexible working is a good alternative.”
#2: Position your Microsoft Center of Excellence for maximum visibility
One of the primary responsibilities of your Microsoft CCOE is to develop best practices, codify them, and disseminate them across the business. To achieve that objective, your center of excellence needs to be visible. Stakeholders, leaders, and users alike must know what the CCOE is, why it’s important, and why they should trust it.
Your CCOE needs backing from the highest and most visible authority figures in your organization. But should also connect with users in every department to build trust, empower users, and get a true picture of our cloud environment in action.
Building credibility is all about proving why the CCOE is necessary, and how it can make a difference for users across the business. Utilize business-wide communications and executive-level representatives to outline the goals of the CCOE. Run pilot projects and communicate their impact. Engage with users regularly and consistently to share successes and remind people how they can connect with your CCOE.
Don’t just convert, though — consult. Create a dialogue with cloud users and carve out easily accessible spaces where end-users and department leaders alike can offer feedback, share concerns, or ask for advice.
Being visible is only half the battle — you also need to be approachable. Whether it’s about spending, security, or operational challenges, your CCOE should welcome all challenges from the business as teachable opportunities to optimize cloud strategy.
#3: Build a culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing
We all know the old saying about teaching a man to fish. The same goes for equipping your users with the understanding and skills they need to better harness the cloud tools at their disposal.
A good CCOE is not about control; it’s about providing guidelines that mitigate risk while enabling agility and speed of innovation. Making sure that all cloud users understand how to get the most out of their tools and services while protecting themselves and the business requires an open and evolving dialogue about governance.
Facilitating knowledge-sharing, developing high-level training strategies, and fostering general awareness are all things that should be on a CCOE’s to-do list.
#4: Create repeatable, sustainable processes
In a larger organization, much of the advice and guidelines your CCOE develops around cloud implementation, deployment, and configuration will be similar across multiple departments and similar services.
Just like cloud automation, templating cloud governance processes can help you expedite transformation and innovate faster. Once your CCOE has established some effective guardrails, policies, and best practices, think about how you can generalize them to be used across every part of your cloud ecosystem.
This especially applies to hiring. If you want to build out your cloud team and scale your CCOE as your business grows, you need a reliable hiring strategy. The market for Microsoft cloud talent professionals is already competitive. As adoption grows, more employers are entering the arena every day to battle it out for skilled technologists;
Microsoft itself predicts that digital acceleration will create up to 149m new roles by 2025.
Though your CCOE might not be directly involved in hiring, it should use its collective experience in the cloud market to develop long-term strategies for building a Microsoft talent pipeline, in the same way it steers other cloud-related best practices.
Microsoft talent solutions for your Cloud Center of Excellence
Introducing a Cloud Center of Excellence is a huge part of achieving ROI on your investment, and sourcing Microsoft talent for the cloud team that will help roll out best practices is just as important.
In a market with high demand (and high turnover) securing the best Microsoft cloud talent can be difficult, but we can help. With Revolent, you can access Microsoft-certified professionals with valuable IT industry experience. Not only is hiring through Revolent far more cost-effective than trying to outbid other employers, but we also set our fees for two years, so you can create a long-term talent pipeline in an affordable and organic way.
The average tenure of a cloud professional is roughly 12 months, but Revolent professionals are contracted for up to two years, allowing them to build an understanding of your business. Furthermore, if you want to take them on as a permanent employee at the end of their contract, you can do so for no additional cost.
