When it comes to moving to and operating in the cloud, having a team of experts to provide guidance through the cloud journey is a must.
What is a Cloud Knowledge Centre?
Why Establish a CKC?
What are the CKC's Responsibilities
Who Makes Up the CKC?
What is the CKC's Strategy & Governance model?
How Will the CKC Operate?
What is a Cloud Knowledge Centre (CKC)?
A Cloud Knowledge Centre (CKC) is a cross-functional team responsible for leading their organization's cloud transformation. The CKC is also a task force that is dedicated to foreseeing and addressing the challenges associated with moving to UBC's hybrid multi-cloud delivery model. The CKC will help UBC plan a clear vision to ensure the transition to cloud delivers its promises and value to the university.
The CKC is concerned with enabling governance, not control— creating guidelines to manage risk and improve outcomes. The CKC needs to be a balance between governance and education. While governance helps manage risk, education ensures teams have the knowledge they need to make good decisions.
The CKC oversees cloud policies, solution architecture, workload placement, and governance. It provides guidelines and guardrails to improve outcome and to reduce risk. It oversees the cloud community of practice, maintains a cloud knowledge base, provides training and education, and actively seeks participation and contribution across the university.
The CKC will provide change leadership to the organization in the following areas:
- Developing cloud policies, procedures, and guidelines
- Encouraging innovation
- Providing guidance in selecting the right provider and/or service
- Supporting the community in managing security and compliance risks
- Providing procedures to efficiently manage costs
- Providing education and training for cloud, allowing the organization to become smarter about cloud
- Promoting, driving, and enabling a cloud enabled transformation across the organization
Why Establish a CKC?
The CKC accelerates cloud adoption and helps build a modern IT organization, with emphasis on cloud governance while maintaining business agility.
As UBC's presence in the cloud continues to grow, the need to manage cloud costs, maintain the highest levels of security and compliance, and have visibility across all services increases as well. This model is a paradigm shift from the traditional view of IT as a cost centre, making IT an enabler.
The CKC allows UBC to accelerate innovation and migration efforts, while managing the overall risk, increasing agility and producing noticeable reductions in the delivery of services. The CKC also increases maturity, and improves quality, reliability, performance, efficiency, security, maintainability, and ultimately end user satisfaction.
With the CKC, IT can provide a self-service model that allows units to consume cloud services, while adhering to guidelines and established repeatable controls.
The CKC Pillars
The CKC is a best practice approach to drive cloud-enabled transformation. It uses the following three pillars to guide itself:
| Governance | Brokerage | Community |
|---|---|---|
| Create policies in collaboration with a cross-functional team and select governance tools to provide financial and risk management.sample content | Assist users in selecting cloud providers, architect the cloud solution(s) and collaborate with the sourcing team for contract negotiation and vendor management. | Raise the level of cloud knowledge in the organization and capture and disseminate best practices through a knowledge base, source code repository, training events, outreach throughout the organization, and more. |
What are the CKC's Responsibilities
The CKC responsibilities include setting cloud policy, guiding service and provider selection, and assisting with solution architecture and workload placement, with the goals of improving outcomes and managing risks. The CKC oversees the organization's cloud computing practices and actively solicit contributions from across the University.
Who Makes Up the CKC?
Members of the CKC team are experts in all things modernization***preceding sentence needs work***. The goal of the CKC is to lead a successful cloud transformation for the university and ensure that everyone is on the same page. The CKC team is made up of people that come from a wide range of backgrounds to bring a variety of perspectives and a balanced set of knowledge and skills to the university.
The CKC also includes members who already have cloud experience. However, with the multidisciplinary nature of the cloud, leaders from the faculties, research, finance, HR, IT, as well as members of the UBC executive team, will be involved in the ongoing discussion around cloud transformation.
What is the CKC's Strategy & Governance model?
A CKC provides the Office of the CIO (OCIO) a way to communicate the CIO's cloud strategy and provide governance through policies and cloud management tools, as well as gather and disseminate cloud best practices. The CKC leads cloud adoption across all service delivery models:
How Will the CKC Operate?
The CKC operates under the authority of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), and is made up of cross-functional and cross-discipline individuals from the organization, ensuring a good distribution of skills, experience, and knowledge.
Collaboration and teamwork
The CKC is a collaborative and respectful group effort. The team is responsible for guiding the transition to cloud across the university. Members of the CKC solicit input from the university.
Openness and Accountability
The CKC is open about its goals and targets, and its focus on the future state. It asks for support when required, and provide open, honest and timely communications. Also, the CKC will be accountable for its actions and decisions.
Understand that cloud is a product
The CKC will treat the cloud as your product and the university as the customers we are enabling. The CKC job will address concerns and questions that the university may have about cloud use. The CKC will provide resources and training materials to help empower UBC's cloud journey.
Open-minded and adaptable to change
With technology, change is inevitable. CKC members easily adapt to changes to the university, technology, and the CKC itself. The CKC structure and principles reflect this mindset and promotes it across the organization.