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Databricks raises $400m in series F funding and tops $6bn valuation

Big data and analytics platform provider Databricks has announced a $400 million (£310m) series F funding round – putting the company at a more than $6 billion valuation.

The San Francisco-based firm, which helped create big data processing framework Apache Spark, only closed its series E round to the tune of $250m back in February, revealing significant growth. The company’s remit is focused around ‘unified data analytics’, whereby artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are combined with data processing for more tangible, actionable results.

The series F round was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) late stage venture fund, with a wide cast list of supporting players, including Coatue Management, Microsoft, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). a16z has long since been a supporter of Databricks, having claimed upon the series E funding that the company was the ‘clear winner in the big data platform race.’ This time round, a16z general partner David George claimed Databricks’ net revenue retention was ‘astounding.’

So why the additional funding? Like its open source heritage, Databricks has built three technologies based around data management and machine learning. Delta Lake is a storage layer which aims to bring reliability to data lakes, MLflow is a platform for the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, while Koalas aims to make Pandas, a Python data science tool, more compatible with big data sets.

Databricks is also looking to put €100 million towards its European centre in Amsterdam, with the company saying its engineering hub had already grown by three times over the past two years. The company is looking at further expansion in the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.

“Data teams at thousands of organisations globally are now leveraging our Unified Data Analytics Platform to solve their toughest problems,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks CEO and co-founder in a statement. “Our bets on massive data processing, machine learning, open source and the shift to the cloud are all playing out in the market and resulting in enormous and rapidly growing global customer demand.

“As a result, Databricks is among the fastest growing enterprise software cloud companies on record,” added Ghodsi.

Databricks was placed in the top 20 of the most recent Forbes Cloud 100, published in September.

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AWS servers hit by sustained DDoS attack


Keumars Afifi-Sabet

23 Oct, 2019

Businesses were unable to service their customers for approximately eight hours yesterday after Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers were struck by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

After initially flagging DNS resolution errors, customers were informed that the Route 53 domain name system (DNS) was in the midst of an attack, according to statements from AWS Support circulating on social media.

From 6:30pm BST on Tuesday, a handful of customers suffered an outage to services while the attack persisted, lasting until approximately 2:30am on Wednesday morning, when services to the Route 53 DNS were restored. This was the equivalent of a full working day in some parts of the US.

«We are investigating reports of occasional DNS resolution errors. The AWS DNS servers are currently under a DDoS attack,» said a statement from AWS Support, circulated to customers and published across social media.

«Our DDoS mitigations are absorbing the vast majority of this traffic, but these mitigations are also flagging some legitimate customer queries at this time. We are actively working on additional mitigations, as well as tracking down the source of the attack to shut it down.»

The Route 53 system is a scalable DNS that AWS uses to give developers and businesses a method to route end users to internet applications by translating URLs into numeric IP addresses. This effectively connects users to infrastructure running in AWS, like EC2 instances, and S3 buckets.

During the attack, AWS advised customers to try to update the configuration of clients accessing S3 buckets to specify the region their bucket is in when making a request to mitigate the impact of the attack. SDK users were also asked to specify the region as part of the S3 configuration to ensure the endpoint name is region-specific.

Rather than infiltrating targeted software or devices, or exploiting vulnerabilities, a typical DDoS attack hinges on attackers bombarding a website or server with an excessive volume of access requests. This causes it to undergo service difficulties or go offline altogether.

All AWS services have been fully restored at the time of writing, however, the attack struck during a separate outage affecting Google Cloud Platform (GCP), although there’s no indication the two outages are connected.

From 12:30am GMT, GCP’s cloud networking system began experiencing issues in its US West region. Engineers then learned the issue had also affected a swathe of Google Cloud services, including Google Compute Engine, Cloud Memorystore, the Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable and Google Cloud Storage. All services were gradually repaired until they were fully restored by 4:30am GMT.

While outages on public cloud platforms are fairly common, they are rarely caused by DDoS attacks. Microsoft’s Azure and Office 365 services, for example, suffered a set of routine outages towards the end of last year and the beginning of 2019.

One instance includes a global incident with US government services and LinkedIn sustaining an authentication outage towards the end of January this year.

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View from the airport: Commvault GO 2019

22 Oct, 2019

Data and backup specialist Commvault devoted a large part of its annual GO conference redefining itself in the eyes of its partners and customers. Inevitably, there was a lot of buzz about what this ‘new Commvault’ actually meant.

The first and most obvious part of that mission was the company’s subtle rebrand, something it clearly hoped would serve as the signifier of a new chapter, and a move away from the recent stagnancy into which it had slipped. With slight changes to the colours and typeface – it improves the aesthetic somewhat. I have to say, though, it was a little underwhelming.

The second, more important aspect, was to use the event to address the growing unease among customers and partners. Our discussions with partners, by and large, suggest this was a moderate success, and there was certainly a sense of energy lacking in Nashville last year, beyond that emanating from the music scene.

This excitement was perhaps encapsulated most by the launch of Metallic, a standalone software as a service (SaaS) venture that pointedly departs from the Commvault brand and forges its own identity. I wasn’t the only one confused as to why Metallic wasn’t released under the wider product umbrella. The rationale was that it grew from within the company like a startup, with its own dedicated team, and that certainly adds up. Yet, reading between the lines, it’s clear the firm recognises it has work to do in addressing a set of issues tied to the Commvault identity.

Connotations that its technology is hard to use, that pricing is too high and confusing, and that Commvault itself is something of a throwback compared to the new kids on the block, are – as one partner put it – three fairly «crippling» attributes. This isn’t to say Commvault hasn’t moved to address these, with Mirchandani stressing numerous times the ‘complexity’ notion is a «myth» that he’s now striving to bust, given recent changes to the platform.

The firm as a whole must now face the reality of the hand it’s been dealt. It’s good, then, that we saw evidence of a strategy that could pave the way for a change in its fortunes. Recent changes to its channel programme, and new hires in the form of industry veterans Mercer Rowe and Edison Peres, should go some way towards addressing the barriers resellers face.

The new venture, Metallic, of course, smacks of a gimmick, but it actually addresses a gap in the market, and seemingly trumps alternative SaaS backup options. Its distribution, too, will be entirely channel-led, starting with select US partners, with successes fed back into Commvault’s existing programme.

Moreover, the broader idea to integrate data management with storage management was the real cornerstone of Mirchandani’s long-term vision. Following the Hedvig acquisition last month, Commvault laid out its ideas for the future, but we’ll have to reserve judgement on this front until a solid model for integration is released.

Broadly speaking, these sorts of ideas and announcements were what I expected to see from Commvault after a shaky 12 months; something shiny to get the conversation going, but reinforced with a sense of substance that partners, who deal with the technology day-in and day-out, can shout about too. 

Recognising the realities of an increasingly multi-cloud landscape was reassuring, as was Mirchandani’s statement that Commvault is happy to work with existing Hedvig customers who use rival backup services, such as those offered by Veeam. It must be said that there’s a risk that Commvault’s confidence, as it follows through on its strategy, may again slip into a familiar sense of complacency.

Persistent repetition, for instance, that Commvault sat at the pinnacle of the Gartner magic quadrant, as well as Forrester’s equivalent, grew fairly tedious. After all, Commvault’s standard of technology has never been a problem, rather, it’s the many elements that coalesce around it.

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Microsoft acquires Mover to ease cloud-based data migration


Bobby Hellard

22 Oct, 2019

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Mover, a cloud-based file migration company, as it looks to facilitate more ways for its customers to move data from other cloud services into the Microsoft 365 cloud suite.

Since its inception eight years ago, Mover has been used in data migration from over a dozen cloud service providers, including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive. And the Canadian-based startup counts companies such as AutoDesk, Symantec and Nike as its customers. Now Mover’s capabilities and expertise will be taken under Microsoft’s corporate wing. 

«As the world moves to Microsoft 365, it needs an excellent self-serve solution for migrating content,» said Eric Warnke, co-founder and CEO of Mover.

«Our technology makes us one of the fastest OneDrive and SharePoint document migrators in the world. My team has proven this time and time again by setting migration speed records for the industry, always meeting customer needs. Security, file fidelity, and transfer accuracy are core tenets of our company and we take pride in our reputation.»

The deal comes just a month after Microsoft acquired similar-sounding Movere, another cloud migration specialist and adds further to its already busy portfolio of cloud firms. In July, Microsoft snapped up BlueTalon, a software company that focuses on data-centric security and hybrid data environments. A month later, it acquired jClarity, a software company that specialises in Java installations.

While it still trails behind AWS, Microsoft’s cloud business is growing fast. The company reported Azure revenue grew 64% in the last quarter, while sales of AWS rose by 37%.

«Our goal is to help customers move to the cloud with confidence,» said Jeff Teper, CVP Office, SharePoint and OneDrive. «Today, we offer several options to support cloud file migrations, including FastTrack and offerings from trusted Microsoft partners, as well as the SharePoint Migration Tool for migrating content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to Microsoft 365. Mover will enhance these offerings with proven tools, plus more self-service options over time.»

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Transitions, tracking and teams: How to get your initiatives up to multi-cloud nine

At the most basic level, nearly every company now uses SaaS systems from different cloud providers. Hybrid private/public clouds are also becoming the preferred option for enterprises, and these networks are inherently distributed. This means most organisations are currently dealing with the challenges of managing networks and services from multiple vendors. They’re having multi-cloud headaches.

We all want complicated, hybrid environments to act like a single system. So, what’s a cloud management professional to do? Here’s a compilation of expert tips for succeeding with multi-cloud.

Understand the business needs

Focusing on why the business relies on this cloud-based CRM solution and needs that provider for big data analytics will enable better decisions. Also keep in mind that, despite they hype, there’s no need to put everything in the cloud all at once—or ever. It’s more appropriate to develop different goals for business units or applications, pointing the IT organisation at where cloud will be value-add. This involves working from the network up, not from the cloud down.

Integrate teams

Traditional siloes no longer apply in the multi-cloud era. Server, storage, network, security, operations, and development all need to work together.

Define natural transition times

Moving a relatively new in-house application to the cloud may not make sense. An older application ready for an overhaul? That one might be able to go cloud-native. There’s a lot of benefit in taking the easy route.

Remain user-centric

Understanding how users engage with applications—and how they want and need to do so—can provide insight into existing cloud services and emerging opportunities. Look at how users are accessing specific services (e.g., via desktop or mobile), for what reasons, and for how long. What works and what are their pain points? Auditing users’ access can also identify when multiple providers are performing the same function so redundancies can be eliminated.

Build for self-service

Empower developers to get the computational power they need and marketing professionals to build trial campaigns in the cloud with easy-access services that go through IT. Doing so will cut down on “shadow IT” and improve visibility and governance of all cloud usage.

Choose vendors and products carefully

Problems are to be expected, so look for partners willing to work with you. All the better if they can guide you toward the proper offerings, not just the ones most profitable for them. Taking VMware for example, there is the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud for traditional apps and Native Hybrid Cloud for microservices-based apps. Using the right one is key.

Automate and standardise

Get humans out of the way whenever possible by automating the monitoring, maintenance, and other tasks of multi-cloud, and even consider outsourcing whatever you can. Also be sure to use the same policies for workloads, data storage, etc., for each environment. One configuration applied across platforms is easier to update, automate, and move.

Track it all

TCO in the cloud can be hard to figure. It’s vital to keep a list of services and regularly evaluate the cost-benefit compared with alternatives. Network issues will also arise, so tracking performance can help target root causes and make the fix process less of a hunting expedition. Nirvana is a single-pane view covering downtime, error alerts, usage rates, and so on.

Foresee the end

Design a generic end-of-life procedure for phasing out a cloud service. It should ensure user accounts and subscriptions are deleted, company data is returned, and providers don’t retain confidential information.

Sound overwhelming? Multi-cloud remains complicated. One of the best ways to make room in the budget and on the agenda is to move non-strategic tasks off the IT team’s plate. Third party maintenance of private cloud, on-premises systems, and co-located assets is a tool that can help reduce the endless multitasking and bring the focus necessary to be effective in multi-cloud deployment and management.

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SAP embraces Microsoft for stronger preferred cloud partnership

SAP has announced the launch of a more detailed cloud partnership with Microsoft – showing how the German software giant’s Embrace project is gaining traction.

Embrace, first announced in May, is SAP’s blueprint to help customers become ‘intelligent enterprises’ by utilising the hyperscaler public clouds of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This includes reference architecture based on various industry verticals, as well as value added services for customers running a cloud-based or hybrid infrastructure on a hyperscaler platform.

This extended partnership with Microsoft, billed as a ‘preferred cloud’ deal, will aim to speed up customer adoption of app development product SAP Cloud Platform and ERP bulwark S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure.

SAP confirmed to CloudTech that there were no similar programs planned with the other hyperscalers right now.

Project Embrace on Microsoft Azure will have a three-pronged strategy for customers; simplifying the move from SAP’s on-premise ERP to S/4HANA, creating a ‘roadmap to the cloud for customers in focused industries… with a path to streamline implementation’, providing a combined support model, alongside the reference architectures, put together with system integrator partners.

SAP – alongside other companies including VMware – have taken on board the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ adage around the largest public cloud providers. At VMworld back in August, VMware touted the fact it had partnerships set up with five of the biggest clouds, including IBM and Alibaba. Oracle came in the following month.

While the potential for collaboration between the Microsofts and Amazons to tap into VMware and SAP’s customer base is impressive, expect some jockeying for position within these frameworks going forward.

Bruce Milne, CMO at hyperconverged infrastructure provider Pivot3, told this publication immediately after the VMworld keynote in August: “There’s an obvious strategic tension in VMware’s collaboration with the hyperscale cloud providers, but for now it appears they’ve agreed to a collaborative détente. Watch this space because that friction is sure to generate sparks eventually.”

Microsoft had seen to be more active in promoting this initiative than others. A blog post from May 9, the day Embrace was first announced, said the Redmond firm would be the first global cloud provider to join the program. SAP’s official note on the same day cited all three hyperscalers, along with unnamed ‘global strategic service partners’.

SAP has also announced its third quarter 2019 results, with the gradual move from on-prem to cloud-based revenues continuing. Cloud revenue went up 37% year on year, while cloud and software revenues went up 12%, and total revenues 13%. A statement from chief financial officer Luka Mucic noted that “despite continued macro uncertainties we couldn’t be more confident to make 2019 another stellar year for SAP.”

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Oracle CEO Mark Hurd dies aged 62


Bobby Hellard

21 Oct, 2019

Mark Hurd, the co-chief executive officer of Oracle and former HP boss died on Friday aged just 62.

Hurd had been in the role for nine years but was forced to take a leave of absence in September due to ill health.

The cloud giant has confirmed the death but told IT Pro that it is not commenting any further.

Instead, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison posted a tribute on Hurd’s website, calling him a «close and irreplaceable friend and trusted colleague».

«Oracle has lost a brilliant and beloved leader who personally touched the lives of so many of us during his decade at Oracle,» Ellison said on Friday. «All of us will miss Mark’s keen mind and rare ability to analyse, simplify and solve problems quickly.

«Some of us will miss his friendship and mentorship. I will miss his kindness and sense of humour. Mark leaves his beloved wife Paula, two wonderful daughters who were the joy of his life, and his much larger extended family here at Oracle who came to love him. I know that many of us are inconsolable right now, but we are left with memories and a sense of gratitude…that we had the opportunity to get know Mark, the opportunity to work with him…and become his friend.»

In September Oracle surprised many with an earlier than expected release of its quarterly earnings. The company then hit investors with a double shock as Hurd announced the board had accepted his leave of absence request for an undisclosed illness.

Hurd shared the CEO role with Safra Catz, who took on sole duties following his departure, with Ellison handling some of his responsibilities during the transition. What’s more, the announcement came a few weeks before the firm’s annual conference, Oracle Open World 2019, where Hurd’s absence hung over the proceedings.

«I would just like to take a moment and say how much I miss Mark Hurd, personally,» said Ellison, during his keynote address. «We’ve worked together for a long time, I love him, and I wish him a speedy recovery.»

Industry veteran

Mark Hurd became a well-known figure in the technology industry, having played a major role in some of the sector’s biggest firms.

Hurd started his career in 1980 as a salesman for National Cash Register (NCR) and worked his way up to CEO during his 25-years at the company. He left in 2005 to become HP’s CEO, one of the biggest personal computer manufacturers at the time. His five-year stint saw the company’s share price double, but his tenure was rocky with a number of controversies, culminating in his departure following a sexual harassment claim.

Despite the troubles, Hurd had a friend in Ellison, who quickly came to his defence and criticized the HP board in a letter to the press, saying it had «just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago».

He joined Ellison’s company in 2010 as president and replaced him as CEO in 2014 in a joint position with Catz. Hurd is survived by his wife Paula, whom he met at NCR, and their two daughters.

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Android gets new security sandboxing features


Adam Shepherd

18 Oct, 2019

Google has brought new security features to web users on Android, with the integration of browser sandboxing capabilities to its Chrome app.

As of Chrome version 77, Android users are now protected by ‘Site Isolation’. This sandboxing feature involves isolating each browser tab from the other tabs in the session, and works by ensuring that web pages from different domains are run as separate processes, reducing the risk of side-channel attacks like the Spectre flaw.

This feature has been active on desktop instances of Chrome for some time, and the Android version is somewhat slimmed-down by comparison; in order to reduce performance overheads, Site Isolation is only enabled for password-protected sites, where users may be at risk of having their credentials stolen. This will help lessen the impact of the feature on smartphone speeds, particularly for cheaper devices with less RAM.

On desktop platforms, meanwhile, the existing sandboxing features have also been strengthened. In addition to side-channel attacks, Chrome can now defend against attacks involving a fully-compromised renderer process.

To coincide with this, the company is temporarily expanding its bug bounty programme to offer greater rewards for bugs involving Site Isolation, as well as including cross-site data disclosure attacks that involve compromised renderers.

Sandboxing is a common security measure, and refers to the process of isolating an environment from neighbouring systems in order to prevent the spread of harmful activity. Sandboxed environments are commonly used by researchers to analyse malware activity, as they allow the malware to be studied without risking the security of the rest of the network or operating system.

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The rise of SD-WAN: How scaling cloud services is key to growing a digital business

  • 93% of enterprises are securing remote locations with a centralised approach that rarely scales to secure every endpoint and identity of remote branch locations, leaving an enterprise more vulnerable to a breach
  • Enabling network security is the greatest challenge enterprises face when managing a highly distributed network with numerous remote locations
  • In an era of cloud-first networks, nine out of 10 companies are still relying on centrally managed networks that don’t scale for remote system users, creating productivity bottlenecks
  • 75% of enterprises experience branch and remote location network interruptions several times a year or more frequently, costing an organisation thousands of dollars an hour in lost productivity

The challenges of scaling cloud services to grow a digital business are many and are well-explained in the recent research report, Remote Office Networks Pose Business and Reliability Risk A Survey of IT Professionals (27 pp., PDF, no opt-in), published on August 2019 by Dimensional Research in collaboration with Infoblox. This report provides valuable insights into why scaling cloud services is essential for growing a digital business.

The study’s findings reflect how remote branch and production locations’ lack of IT security and site personnel are one of the most challenging constraints to overcome and keep growing their business.

99% or nearly all enterprises with distributed operations suffer adverse business impacts from network interruptions. Of the many causes of network disruption, one of the most common is not directing traffic to the closest point of entry into cloud platforms.

Taking a software-based approach to wide-area networking (SDWAN) is proving effective in improving cloud-based application performance, including Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based application performance. The report shows how SD-WAN is replacing outdated centralised IT models that lack the scale to flex and support new digital business models.

Key insights from the research report include the following:

Enterprises realise the model of relying on centralised IT security isn’t scaling to support and protect the proliferation of user devices with internet access, leaving branch offices less secure than ever before

Every IT architect, IT director, or CIO needs to consider how taking an SD-WAN-based approach to network management reduces the risk of a breach and data exfiltration. 93% of enterprises are securing remote locations with a centralised approach that rarely scales to secure every endpoint and identity of remote branch locations, leaving an enterprise more vulnerable to a breach.

Enterprises are upgrading their core network services, including DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, on cloud-based DDI platforms to bring greater security scale and reliability across their enterprise networks. Enterprises are also devising Zero Trust Security (ZTS) frameworks to secure every network, cloud, and on-premise platform, operating system, and application across their branch offices. 

Chase Cunningham of Forrester, Principal Analyst, is the leading authority on Zero Trust Security, and his recent video, Zero Trust in Action, is worth watching to learn more about how enterprises can secure their IT infrastructures. You can find his blog here.

75% or the majority of an enterprises’ branch offices experience network interruptions several times a year, with 49% of them requiring three or more hours to resolve remote office network outages

Enterprises continue to pay a very high price in lost productivity due to network interruptions and the time it takes to troubleshoot them and get a branch or remote location back online.

Enterprises are upgrading their core network services, including DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, on cloud-based DDI platforms to bring greater scale and reliability across their enterprise networks. Cloud-based DDI platforms enable enterprises to manage networking for hundreds to thousands of remote sites with unprecedented cost-efficiency.

Relying on centralised IT creates many challenges and security threats for remote offices, with the most costly not having IT staff at remote sites

Network security at remote locations is the greatest challenge enterprises face when managing a highly distributed network with numerous remote locations. A contributing factor to security being the leading challenge of managing a highly distributed network is the lack of IT employees at remote branches. 65% of enterprises are routinely sending IT employees to remote branches to resolve networking issues alone.

Travel costs combined with lost productivity from having to send IT technicians out for a week or longer to solve network performance issues is another reason why enterprises are adopting cloud-based DDI platforms.

Enterprises are adopting cloud-based DDI platforms that enable enterprises to simplify the management of highly distributed remote networks as well as to optimise the network performance of cloud-based applications

Dimensional Research’s study reflects how enterprises are meeting the challenge of increasingly complex, distributed networks that have a proliferating number of remote locations and endpoints. The majority of enterprises, 71%, are looking to integrate core network services, DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, into a single cloud-based DDI platform.

The problem is, conventional DDI solutions for branch locations are too slow or complicated for a cloud-first world. The following graphic from the study shows what is motivating enterprises to adopt SD-WAN today:

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How to create a cloud centre of excellence: A guide

You may have heard that creating a cloud centre of excellence (CCoE) is formative in your cloud strategy, resulting in a huge difference in the value of cloud migration for an organisation. Here’s how to plan it out for success.

What is a cloud centre of excellence?

In the simplest terms, a CCoE is a team of experts, either in-house or external, who have the knowledge, experience and skills to help you plan and move to the cloud. In reality, in order for your CCoE to be successful, it must be run by the people who are charged with implementing a fundamental shift in the way that your company thinks and works.

This change needs to happen across the whole organisation, and as such, it must be a cross-functional team of people. They need to understand how to develop and manage cloud strategy, governance and best practices, but also have business as well as technical skills, security know-how, product knowledge, and much more.

It’s all about the team: Avoiding silos for cloud adoption

In many organisations, there is a varied understanding and use of cloud technologies. In some cases, there might even be different infrastructures used in different areas of the business. While cloud adoption is growing year on year, it’s often led by key individual decision-makers or departments, and the rest of the company is left unsure how to proceed, or even why, creating uneven cloud use or strategy, even within the same enterprise.

While technology is a huge part of cloud adoption, people are what the success of your cloud strategy will ultimately hinge upon. If your business cannot get employees at every level on board and understanding what it takes for business transformation, you may have lost before you’ve begun. A CCoE makes sure that cloud adoption isn’t siloed and reserved for one-off projects by enthusiastic or forward-thinking departments, instead providing a strategy and path for cloud adoption company-wide.

What is a CCoE responsible for?

Planning to move to the cloud is not the same as the move itself, or embracing change and innovation once you’re there. You can start small, but remember that your needs will change as your cloud roadmap moves from planning to migration and growth. Technology and responsibilities can and will shift over time. As such, you should ensure that there is the ability to scale and to learn within and across your CCoE overall. As a starting point, think about four distinct cross-functional roles that need to be filled:

  • Structure and operations: What operations are you focusing on, and how can you ensure consistency across departments in the organisation? Which teams should you be interacting with, and how can you pull departments on board and make sure you’re on the same page? As you interact with various parts of the company, these members of the CCoE will identify limitations, such as potential security challenges and opportunities, for example, valuable places to implement CD/CI pipelines
     
  • Evaluation: Your CCoE team needs to stay ahead of the technical curve. Cloud technology is a fast-paced world, and cross-functional experts will stay on top of new services or feature enhancements, knowing how to implement these for your own business strategy. With this in place, your organisation begins to feel a culture of confidence, and an ability to lead rather than follow when it comes to cloud strategy
     
  • Governance: Security and governance need to be at the center of everything, implemented from day zero so that you can keep to DevOps practices and pipelines without being held back due to error or lack of understanding. Your CCoE should be setting the groundwork for an organisation as they move to the cloud. Keeping the policy and security requirements in place behind the scenes is an integral part of a CCoE  
     
  • Innovation: The right people for a CCoE will be risk-takers who are results-oriented. The cloud is no place for caution, it allows you to think and move fast, trying new things and iterating and monitoring, measuring and trying again. Smart thinkers who enable strategy and innovation are key, working across departments to understand the security and layers of the cloud and how to work with them instead of in spite of them

Who benefits from a CCoE?

When an organisation experiences consistency in approach and strategy, everyone benefits. Adoption and speed of cloud strategy are improved automatically when you use a “templatised” deployment, and have the right people in the right places for success.

A CCoE enables value at every level. All stakeholders know what’s expected of them, what they are responsible for and why, resulting in far less uncertainty or frustration. The leadership and IT teams now have a better understanding of the steps they need to take to meet their goals and a unified approach to onboarding new technologies, lessening the learning curve and the need for troubleshooting. The customers and end-users are now supported by innovation and best practices.

The principles to make this happen

Building the right team for a CCoE isn’t a simple task. Internally, you might find that you want to start building this essential part of your organisation, but you don’t have the knowledge of technology or best practices to make this happen. If that’s the case, an external advisor is essential to guide you in building your CCoE, a consultant that can support you in recruiting or training personnel to adequately represent teams across the whole organisation, and then become a partner as your cloud journey progresses. The added benefits include:

  • Strategy: Cloud is not the end destination, but rather the enabler for organisational growth. With guidance, you can build a roadmap for success and long term change, understanding where to put your resources and budget, and how to govern your cloud adoption overall to make the most out of this innovation
     
  • Experience: Tried and tested insight into the best practices of cloud adoption. Your CCoE team will have a partner with years of experience to support them internally, with advice and support every step of the way
     
  • Know-how: A wide range of knowledge and skills, from security to product strategy. A cloud expert can highlight the gaps you need to be filled, and give accurate steps to follow so that you get it right the first time

However you build your cloud centre of excellence, it’s foundational for building a cloud strategy that is both sustainable and scalable across an organisation, maximising your ability to reduce risk, and see benefits from the cloud.

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