Why channel partners need a Cloud Centre of Excellence
Article submitted by Tiago Fernandes, Director Cloud Centre of Excellence, Europe at Tech Data
The cloud is one of today’s most demanded forms of technology, constantly evolving with new services and updates. According to IDC’s latest cloud forecast, “whole cloud” spending will surpass $1.3 trillion by 2025. In a similar vein, according to Canalys spending on cloud services in the third quarter of 2021 increased 35% to $49.4 billion. This trend is a testament to the recognised advantages business leaders see in the cloud.
Following the growth of cloud adoption, more and more organisations are becoming aware of the complexities that need to be overcome before the benefits can be realised. In ironing out the complexities, cloud centres of excellence can be called upon to to help support partners and amplify cloud expertise through the market. By doing so, partners can augment their team’s skills and access the expertise they need to reduce their customer’s IT complexity and costs whilst making their own business more scalable.
An evolving cloud environment
In a world where public cloud vendors have more than than 300 cloud services (from IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), there are reams of updates and new features to contend with on a weekly basis. As such, channel partners are always supporting their customers in assessing which features are most useful to them, and what changes they need to make to their cloud environments to configure and optimise these solutions.
One of the changes brought forth by the move to cloud is that people’s skills are no longer aligned to managing networking, compute, or storage in vendor silos. With a CCoE, highly knowledgeable cloud architects exist to augment a partner’s team, supporting them across a range of topics.
Establishing a CCoE can boost flexibility
To triage undesirable cloud outcomes, partners can work with a CCoE to quickly rectify, as well as mitigate the security risks, cover the skills gap and deliver projects to end customers. Through the use of dashboards and monitoring, businesses can facilitate communication and optimise the cloud environment.
Acceleration of cloud adoption
A key benefit for large organisations is that a CCoE can help achieve the speed required for a smooth transition to cloud. As businesses accelerate innovation and migration efforts, the CCoE will work with partners to design, deploy and configure new and existing multi-cloud environments to ensure minimal costs and increased business agility. It is very easy for these multi-cloud environments to become highly complex and, by extension, costly. That means having the right expertise is all the more important. The CCoE can provide the advice to help teams complete these large and complicated projects efficiently.
How can this work in practice?
There are a few things to consider in the journey to cloud. Does the customer want an IaaS or PaaS platform? Who will understand your current infrastructure and design the new future environment? Partners can work alongside a centre of excellence to help match the unique requirements and characteristics necessary for their customer, delivering the full end to end solution. Our goal is to research and architect cloud solutions that empower partners to achieve great outcomes with technology.
As it stands, the pandemic has accelerated the demand for cloud service, proving a major market opportunity, but also a challenge. Cloud centres of excellence exist to provide partners with the support and expertise to get these complex business transformation projects right for their customers and can help them successfully build their business.
