Create a cloud centre of excellence as your single threaded cloud governance team

Before migrating applications, NHS organisations should establish a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) team and build out a secure, compliant cloud foundation known as a landing zone.

The landing zone provides a standard environment in chosen cloud platforms for product teams to deploy applications while managing risks.

The CCoE team has several key responsibilities:

• construct and manage enterprise-level landing zones in public clouds that the organisation adopts. They collaborate closely with product teams deploying applications
• define organisation-specific cloud guardrails and policies around governance, security and compliance
• offer consulting on cloud best practices to the organisation, using a common framework
• ceate reusable infrastructure-as-code modules and patterns to encourage standard deployments across the organisation
• provide a clear process for teams to contribute assets to the CCoE

By investing upfront in landing zones and a CCoE team, NHS organisations can accelerate cloud adoption in a secure, controlled manner. The landing zone gives product teams a ready foundation to build on rather than starting from scratch.

The CCoE drives consistency, compliance, and skills development. It allows organisations to define boundaries for cloud usage while enabling innovation within guardrails.

This approach prevents fragmentation and shadow IT by providing the tools and guidance for teams to be cloud ready. As cloud adoption matures, the CCoE helps automate and share best practices.

With a robust CCoE and landing zone in place, NHS organisations can migrate applications rapidly while avoiding pitfalls like uncontrolled spend, compliance gaps and inadequate resilience.