The Cloud Center of Excellence: The Secret Ingredient Your Enterprise is Missing

When we survey the technology landscape today, it’s clear that the world has changed forever. The speed facilitated by a cloud infrastructure has truly set industry on its head – favoring tiny startups over centuries-old Fortune 500 behemoths, and handing competitive advantages to companies that can be nimble and pivot on a dime.

So, how can larger enterprises – laden with bureaucracy and often hamstrung by policies, procedures and processes – function more like slick, savvy cloud natives?

Enter the concept of the “Managed Cloud Center of Excellence,” a way that we at Blue Sentry Cloud are responding to an oft-repeated request by our larger clients: How can we go as fast as startups, and take full advantage of the speed benefits that the cloud has to offer?

For the uninitiated, cloud natives enjoy a huge advantage over those with on-prem or co-located server resources from the moment of execution. That’s because to deploy a workload in the cloud, you don’t have to provision hardware, wait for it to arrive, deploy the operating system, install the database platform, install your application software, ensure the connectivity, and so on.

To deploy a workload in the cloud, you simply type a line of code at a command line interface at the AWS console, and you can have a SQL server or any other database platform running in just a few minutes.

It’s this kind of speed that larger enterprises would love to have – but are often stymied, because different business units and groups are beholden to rules surrounding corporate governance, standards, and security that blockade instantaneous infrastructure provisioning – and in turn, slow the creative process. (Note that at most startups, I could simply lean over to the CEO and ask for permission!)

That’s why the Cloud Center of Excellence enjoys such an important role in the enterprise dynamic – both charged with helping the enterprise to move in a much more expedited manner in the cloud, and given a mandate to bypass the traditional barriers that would slow the process.

Other benefits of a Managed Cloud Center of Excellence include:

• A single code repository for templates that allow for the rapid deployment of workloads to the cloud;
• Network management to ensure space is flexible enough to allow routing rules to be scalable;
• Management of hardening standards to ensure proper cost management.

Most importantly, the Cloud Center of Excellence is designed to be a custom built, turn-key operation that can either embed with the enterprise’s existing IT engineers as part of its core level of expertise; or it can be dropped in, like special forces, to focus on more urgent, specialized tasks in a transitional phase.

That said, we at Blue Sentry Cloud believe that the Cloud Center of Excellence should always be considered a permanent fixture of any growing organization. That’s because as your company grows and evolves; as customers place new demands on you; and, as the cloud changes; it’s incumbent on the center of excellence to stay ahead of that learning curve and keep your organization relevant and up to date, using best practices as they evolve.

If your enterprise desires the speed and agility enjoyed by smaller startups; a commitment to continuous learning, at all levels of the cloud; and assistance from a team that takes ownership in its work, contact us today. We’d be delighted to assist you in building a Cloud Center of Excellence that will propel your enterprise forward.