Cloud organisation guidance

The use of the cloud is not only a technology function but is a business change exercise and needs to be driven by boards of NHS and healthcare organisations as this affects several key roles within the business from the traditional ways of working with people working in their specialist areas. Cloud mature organisations need to have a good understanding of where the use of cloud interacts with certain job roles within an organisation.

As this requires business change in ways of thinking and working there are key areas that will be impacted by cloud adoption from overall business strategy, roles of people within the organisation, creation of new functions, upskilling, and participating with other cloud capabilities across the NHS and healthcare sector to create a community that as a collective can share knowledge, learnings, code, and capabilities and as a collective drive the future state of cloud adoption.

As the cloud is becoming more common in the technology services that we buy, build, and consume this needs to be reflected in the NHS or healthcare organisation business strategy and the business having the correct and capable resources within the organisation to efficiently take advantage of cloud offering.

Cloud technologies due to scale, power, and resiliency are usually the foundation that underpins a number of other strategies within the business and need to reference their interaction to cloud strategy within them and how the business will meet the cloud foundational needs required to make these other strategies a success.

There is also an understanding that NHS cloud strategy has an impact on other strategies with your organisation with regards to organisational development, procurement, and people.

The business strategy for your organisation will require reference the NHS Cloud Strategy as being the foundation to enabling key strategies within your organisation to be consumed upon its policies and principles.

The roles and participation of your people within your business are crucial to make your cloud adoption successful from the start and enabling other areas into the business is key to provide a fluid route to consuming cloud products and services. With cloud adoption, these roles are not limited to technical people within your organisation but members of the board all the way throughout the organisation to the operational teams. All these roles required have a basic knowledge of cloud understanding but also be champions for cloud adoption. 

Central to the Cloud COE’s role is setting the foundation for successful cloud migration and encouraging a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing. Cloud COE team members advise on and implement solutions, providing both thought leadership and hands-on support. In practical terms, a Cloud COE can be established based on practices, workstreams, processes, tools, or other significant structuring factors. Across organisations, however, there are several characteristics that successful Cloud COEs will have in common

• hands-on: Within a CCOE, there should be individuals who are able to do the hands-on work needed to build and test cloud solutions
• cloud-centric: The CCOE should include members who will specialise in cloud and cloud-specific functions
• technical: The CCOE should include experienced individuals with a history of architecting and building past solutions within the organisation
• visionary: The CCOE should consider a multi-project viewpoint to understand repeatability and long-term benefits or goals for the organisation
• multidisciplinary: Members of the team reflect the diverse perspectives of the stakeholders in the project
• empowered: The CCOE should have decision-making power without the need for higher-level sign-off
• agile: The CCOE should understand the necessary requirements to be able to deliver short-term wins such as short development cycles and an iterative approach to building products
• engaged: The individuals within the CCOE should be dedicated, able to commit full-time to the endeavour and the process
• integrated: The individuals within the CCOE should be sourced from existing areas of the business to allow for easy integration into existing teams and organisational constructs

• small: The CCOE should start as small as possible, ideally 10 team members or fewer, while still incorporating the knowledge and expertise to accomplish the other characteristics

Individual CCOEs differ across organisations, and they also differ across time. The organisational knowledge and capabilities that the CCOE reflects will evolve over time, as will the cloud maturity level of the organisation. As the CCOE evolves, it will increasingly be populated with engineers who have experience, and a deep understanding of how critical functions currently operate. They will know how to translate existing data centre–based platforms into cloud-based platforms, and how to host greenfield applications on the cloud platform using cloud-native services. 

As Cloud technology rapidly changes on a weekly basis as new features and products are released by cloud service providers and software vendors it is key that NHS and healthcare staff have the ability to keep updated with their knowledge, training and have a safe environment where they can build and trail these new technologies away from production-based services.

It is also key to promote certification as an understanding and achievement for the team and individuals. This training and certification should not just be limited to the technical team but all member of the organisation who consume, manage and/or procure cloud services. Most of the cloud services provide an introduction certificate to their cloud platform (AWS Cloud Practitioner, Microsoft Azure Cloud Fundamentals, Google Fundamental, etc.) that is open to everyone to promote a basic understanding of cloud adoption, terminology, and key principles including cost and support management.

As training provides the understanding required to successfully adopt cloud technologies it is also a valued tool in gathering insights into the Cloud Centre of Excellence skills matrix and understand where knowledge gaps are within the team that need to be addressed and also the best route to provide the training required to your people whether that be classroom-based, online learning or hands-on self-paced.

The NHS Cloud community is an enabler for allowing the CCoEs to call upon each other’s experiences, knowledge, thinking, and assurances and as a channel to raise and issues, risks, or proposed policy changes to the NHS policymakers.

The CCoE participation in these groups is key to remove the duplication in effort in adopting cloud services within the NHS and healthcare and allows a means to cross-check approaches and escalate for clarification or actions to unblock a CCoE’s workstream.

There are two communities of practice that are available for a CCoE to be a part of and contribute to; the technical community of practice is aimed to allow your cloud centre of excellence the capability to share its and provide access to technical expertise across the NHS and healthcare bodies; the culture community of practice is to allow non-technical functions of the CCoE again the ability to share and learn other CCoE’s approaches to cloud culture adoption. Both of these communities will be led by representation from NHS England.

Both of the technical and culture communities will encourage organic forums to form and mature specialising in certain areas of cloud technologies or cloud supporting services that will be chaired by members of the community to drive participation and knowledge sharing but will feedback their learning and ideas to the communities of practice. The diagram below sets out the structure of the community and the routes to the central cloud centre of enablement managed by NHS England policymakers.

The Cloud Centre of Enablement will be managed by NHS England and will feed into the national Architectural and System Design Board which enables a path to NHS Leaders and ministerial input if/when required.

It is required the CCoE’s participation in the Technical and Culture Communities to allow CCoE’s to remain up to date and feedback into changes with regards to cloud adoption or to provide valued input into national discussions around cloud adoption.