Accelerating Cloud Adoption

Chapter 5. Cloud Operating Models: Implement Your Strategy

One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is how quickly teams can stand up infrastructure and bring new applications and services to their customers. This agility is a game-changer—but if not deployed in a secure, reliable, and compliant manner, it can also have catastrophic consequences. One of the biggest reasons that security, compliance, and infrastructure teams push back against adopting cloud is their fear that the developers will put the company at great risk because the proper controls and oversight are not in place.

You learned in Part I of this book that many of the processes and controls put in place for managing software in the datacenter do not translate well into the cloud. So how can organizations offer cloud services to their software developers while still implementing the proper controls to keep their company safe? It starts with the cloud operating model.

This chapter will introduce cloud operating models and the details of the cloud platform, including roles and platform operating models. We’ll go into the differences between the various models that determine how a cloud platform operates. We’ll also look at cloud governance and how to build a corporate culture that allows your platform to empower developers and other consumers.

The following chapters will continue our tour of the platform with a look at different ways to structure teams’ engagement with your cloud platform, as well as the platform ...