Bridging the Cloud Gap: 3 Reasons You Need a Cloud Operating Model

A cohesive Cloud Optimization Strategy (COS) can only take your business so far. Unless your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) are aligned with overall strategic business goals, CloudOps will remain an operational silo with limited cross-organizational benefits.

A broad, strategic organizational framework is needed to bridge the gap between your optimized cloud and regular operations. By enabling a Cloud Operating Model (COM), your cloud operations can have a direct impact on business performance.

Like a COS, a COM is a body of best practices, governance processes, technical expertise, and infrastructure tools. But while a COS deals solely with CloudOps optimization, the COM promotes cloud-to-business-unit interoperability across the whole organization and accelerates enterprise-wide cloud optimization benefits.

Here are 3 cloud-led governance and productivity enhancements that a cohesive COM brings to your business:

A COM aligns CloudOps best practices and governance processes with the broader organization. Access to cloud knowledge centers and specialist advisory adds value by providing regular business units with the support they need to leverage cloud advantages.

Execute proactive cloud solutions optimization to accelerate cross-team adoption and enterprise maturity:

• Prioritize and sequence developmental cycles and workloads to add value to strategic intent and business objectives as soon as possible
• Implement migration best practices thoroughly to ensure cloud workloads operate at optimum efficacy from the start
• Define and evaluate resource considerations for cloud development and operations processes. Critical roles and functions include:
  • Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoEs) to manage knowledge sharing, collate business unit best practices, and store reusable resources
  • Vendor Management Offices (VMOs) to monitor CSP contracts, maximize Service Level Agreement (SLA) value, evaluate service efficiencies, clean up vendor environments, and source providers to suit evolving cloud needs
  • Project Management Offices (PMOs) to oversee internal change management and transformation efforts
  • Automated cloud microservices for data capture, analytics, data storage and traffic management, and maintenance of cloud infrastructure
• Establish internal feedback channels to foster open communications between cloud and regular teams. Frequent coordination can assist regular units with:
  • Project management
  • Cloud tools and solutions adoption
  • End-user infrastructure optimization
  • Translating cloud strategy imperatives into actionable IT transformations

A COM evaluates performance data from both regular and cloud operational workloads, identifying points of synergy and optimizing both regular and cloud infrastructure for cohesion. Key strategic business objectives are constantly aligned to operational optimization efforts, providing teams with the data they need to maintain cohesion:

• CSP and vendor performance data
• Solution design, testing, and deployment evaluations
• Application topography mapping
• Service contract efficiencies

Synthesis occurs at every stage of the cloud journey, from migration planning to development optimization and cloud environment maintenance. Synergy focus areas for common optimization include:

• Cloud organization and skills
  • Consult business objectives when defining core cloud competencies, solution development needs, resource domains, and target end-users
  • Map the cross-organizational ecosystem to identify linkage points with the cloud enterprise. Restructure linkages to promote efficient resource access, utilization, and cross-team maturity. Examples include:
    • Common operational competencies
    • Cloud application and solution endpoint topology
    • Shared microservices
    • End-user tools and shared platforms
    • Central Centers of Excellence (COEs)
• Standardized operational procedures to minimize reworking
  • Continuously evaluate, adjust, and distribute migration and development best practices, target architectures, design patterns, reusable tools and templates, and training materials based on solutions optimization efforts
  • Build in central optimization data and operational requirements as early as possible to ensure optimal cloud state efficiencies

The journey to cloud maturity is a marathon effort, and sustained support for ongoing operations is vital to long-term success.

A COM promotes, facilitates, and reports cloud benefits and processes to the wider organization, clearly demonstrating how cloud enhances regular operations. Prominent business units, their critical pain points, and measures to answer them include:

• Finance teams want to scrutinize projected cost-savings. Cost data by organization, department, domain, solution, and project – both over time and in real time – are crucial capabilities to boost financial confidence and maintain adoption momentum.
• CloudOps teams want quantified feedback data of operational efficiencies, processes, and cloud tool impact on regular operations. Design data metrics to match the data precision and granularity required.
• Executive leadership and other internal stakeholders need proof of cloud’s impact – both in terms of performance gains and cost-savings. Specific feedback processes and metrics for each business unit should be designed to clarify requirements and maximize synergies.

Executed correctly, a COM will provide stakeholders across the organization vision of cloud enterprise impact and ongoing optimization benefits, producing consistent engagement for the duration of your cloud journey.

Your cloud enterprise will develop a COM whether you like it or not. It is best to start developing one that supports your cloud strategy as early as possible to set the pace and maximize your chances of success.

Consult expert advisory to determine your cloud enablement needs and formulate a COM to answer them effectively.