Today, organizations are on a continuous journey of transformation to enhance key areas such as: reducing the time to market for digital products, fostering operational excellence across all layers of their operating model, and maintaining a competitive edge. However, these advancements must not come at the expense of cost-efficiency or cybersecurity, particularly when handling sensitive organizational data.
As organizations move to public and private clouds to take advantage of their many operational benefits, they are increasingly shifting away from single-provider solutions. According to the latest Flexera State of the Cloud Report, 89% of organizations now use multi-cloud strategies. Many organizations also manage hybrid environments, which are a combination of cloud and on-premises data centers. Hybrid cloud gives organizations the ultimate flexibility by enabling them to take advantage of cloud innovation where possible while maintaining full control over business-critical areas, such as sensitive data, or choosing the best TCO infrastructure & operations.
From a data maturity perspective, organizations face many challenges, like industry-specific regulatory requirements, different Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) for delivery of insights, and different levels of technical skills and abilities. Despite these differences, most companies follow a well-established analytics lifecycle encompassing data ingestion, data engineering, analytics, visualization, and machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) processes. However, the exponential growth of data, combined with the proliferation of tools designed to extract its value, have created significant hurdles. These include decreased productivity and profitability, which are driven by a shortage of talent and the maintenance overhead associated with managing complex, heterogeneous ecosystems.
To increase productivity and profitability organization-wide, teams need access to a seamless framework that combines cloud operations, analytics, and data science functions to promote interoperability, automation, security, and governance.
The strategic importance of a Cloud Center of Excellence
According to the Flexera report, most organizations (63%) have a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) or plan to create one within the next year (14%). At the same time, 70% of large enterprises already have a CCoE, whereas only 29% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) do. About 15% of enterprises expect to add a CCoE in the next twelve months, and 6% expect to add one beyond that time. Just over a quarter (26%) of SMBs are planning to have a CCoE in the future.
A cross-functional CCoE will guide your organization's teams and leadership, overcoming many of the challenges with cloud computing by providing reusable artifacts for other teams' benefits, reducing the cognitive load while accelerating cloud-native maturity, allowing teams to spend more time on business value. These include:
1. Federated Expertise: CCoE provides a central structure of the best experts from different teams and business units who are proficient in critical areas, not just in technologies. The CCoE members are leaders within their teams and areas of expertise, mastering communication, leadership, business acumen, and emotional intelligence.
The CCoE facilitates better decision-making and strategy formulation, architecting reusable assets to empower teams across the organization.
2. Governance and Compliance: CCoE establishes governance policies and ensures compliance with: regulatory standards, well-architected frameworks, security frameworks, and business-critical design principles. These policies enhance security and risk management across clouds and data operations efficiently.
In addition to these critical aspects, Cloudera provides out-of-the-box certification for the majority of security certifications, required by many industries to operate.
3. Cost Optimization: By optimizing cloud resource usage and implementing cost management strategies, CCoE helps reduce overall cloud expenditure, creating a FinOps strategy every team should follow.
4. Portfolio Hierarchy: A primary goal of the CCoE is to create reusable artifacts that provide self-service product blueprints for the organization. These products inherit best practices for cloud architecture, development, and operations, enhancing the efficiency and reliability of cloud-based services. One of the most effective approaches to achieving this is through the establishment of reference architectures.
5. Skills Development: CCoE supports the upskilling of employees by providing training and resources, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
6. Accelerated Cloud Adoption: With its guidance and support, CCoE accelerates the adoption of cloud technologies within the organization, enabling faster time to market and innovation.
7. Risk Mitigation: By conducting thorough assessments and implementing mitigation strategies, CCoE minimizes risks associated with cloud migration and operation.
8. Standardization: CCoE establishes standards and frameworks for cloud deployment and management, promoting consistency and interoperability across different cloud environments.
9. Vendor Management: CCoE manages relationships with cloud service providers, ensuring alignment with organizational objectives and negotiating favorable terms.
10. Business Agility: Through its agile approach and continuous improvement initiatives, CCoE enables the organization to respond quickly to changing market demands and opportunities.
Cloudera stands out as the premier choice for large organizations addressing modern data challenges. It supports CCoEs worldwide in standardizing product portfolios across various business units while ensuring data maturity and cloud-native processes, including world-class security, auditing, and lineage. The integrated platform uniquely enables organizations to navigate and overcome critical challenges including cloud adoption and deploying production-ready AI.
Benefits of Cloudera
Cloudera is a mature, enterprise-grade platform that manages the full data lifecycle. It is designed for rapid, secure deployment in compliance with industry standards, enabling end-users to focus on deriving value from data while aligning with corporate policies. By accelerating time to value, Cloudera allows IT and R&D teams to concentrate on achieving business goals rather than dealing with development and integration challenges. These are some key benefits that the Cloudera hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI provides:
- “Edge2AI” Self-Service and Low/No Ops Platform: The platform offers the full data lifecycle anywhere at scale, from IoT field management and ingestion to AI on a self-service model.
- Enterprise Support, Migration Acceleration Programs, Migration Assistants, and Professional Services: Cloudera offers innovative tools and professional services bundles to facilitate customer cloud journeys and improve the maturity of projects, resulting in cost-efficiency.
- Most Open and Complete Data Platform: Customers can avoid vendor lock-in by integrating open source projects designed for modern data architectures. Our strong belief is that open source, open standards, and open markets will drive the next wave of innovation, powering every organization with open-source, community-shared development and knowledge.
- Security: Recently, Cloudera achieved FedRAMP "In Process" milestone to deliver a true hybrid data platform that securely accelerates AI across the U.S. Government, already completing SOC2 and ISO27001. Cloudera helps project leaders with internal security approvals, InfoSec, and legal, in addition to a clear shared responsibility model where Cloudera takes ownership of the platform software patches, Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVEs), and infrastructure lifecycle management. Customers and partners only need to plan the required updates based on their maintenance window opportunities.
- Unified Governance and Auditing for Any Compute Form Factor: There is no other full data lifecycle management platform with such a broad governance scope, nor hybrid and multi-cloud integration capabilities.
By leveraging a modern, unified data platform that combines cloud operations and data analytics, organizations can seamlessly automate important tasks and work with data while abiding by even the most stringent security and governance requirements.
Learn more about Cloudera’s data platform.
