Dive Brief:
- The majority of enterprises have a central cloud team or cloud center of excellence (CCoE) to guide companywide strategy, according to Flexera's State of the Cloud report. The company surveyed 750 global IT leaders.
- Despite the trend of decentralized IT provisioning, over half of cloud teams are responsible for governing their company's use and cost of IaaS and PaaS.
- More than half of enterprises report using cloud managed service providers (MSPs), and another 13% plan to use them in the future.
Dive Insight:
The number of companies with central cloud governance, whether it's a team or center of excellence, rose from 66% in 2019 to 74% in 2022.
Typically, a central cloud team starts with a small group of people — , often cloud architects — who are familiar with cloud best practices, providers, pricing models and discount mechanisms, among other things.
Despite their name, there's some nuance in the terminology around central cloud teams or cloud centers of excellence, according to Brian Adler, senior director of cloud market strategy at Flexera.
"Cloud center of excellence kind of implies centralization, but what you're centralizing is the best practice architecture," said Adler. These teams can steer business units toward using specific services from a curated, pre-approved list of providers.
Another factor driving reliance on central governance is increased corporate reliance on multicloud. Nearly nine in 10 organizations have a multicloud strategy in place, according to the report.
Eight in 10 companies operate hybrid cloud systems, with more than half relying on multiple private and public cloud.
"We are seeing more and more organizations that aren't locked into that one provider," said Adler. "They might have started that way but they realized that there's a myriad of services from these different providers."
Multicloud strategies increase the need for a team that can advise in terms of best practices to follow, he said.
