September 2021 Summaries

Archera has secured a $7 million Series A funding round led by Ridge Ventures and Amplify Partners with participation from other investors, to further develop its platform and grow its team, aiming to expand its solution to address the needs of customers across all stages of cloud adoption journey. The company's goal is to empower customers to harness their full potential to rapidly innovate using the cloud, providing a fundamentally different approach to solving customer problems by leveraging automation to remove manual work demanded of customers. With the funding, Archera plans to accelerate development of its existing solutions for multiple cloud providers and build features such as cloud migration planning and advanced modeling and forecasting for multi-cloud provisioning. The company is determined to pursue building a system that can address every challenge in cloud resource management, enabling frictionless innovation on the cloud.

Containers in computing are essentially standard units of software that can be used to package and store code, including all the code's dependencies, or software that the code relies on to run, making them highly portable and efficient. Containers differ from Virtual Machines (VMs) in terms of speed, size, and security, with containers being ideal for DevOps teams who prioritize speed, portability, and running multiple containerized applications on one server, while VMs are better suited for workloads that require utmost security or full OS capabilities. The Kubernetes platform is an open-source management tool for containers and containerized workloads, providing services such as automated deployment, scaling, and management, increasing efficiency by automating manual processes. Cloud computing services offer a natural fit with containers, providing isolated environments, cloud storage options, and automated management of containerized applications, making it an ideal choice for companies adopting containerized workloads to increase productivity and functionality while decreasing management time and resources.

Your Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) team plays a crucial role in determining the success of your cloud-enabled transformation and aligning it with your company's strategic goals. To build an effective CCoE team, you need to assess your current cloud operations, establish a mandate that defines goals and objectives, recruit members from multiple departments with technical expertise, manage their growth as needed, and encourage a long-term outlook, agile practices, and experimentation with new technologies.

A Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) is a centralized team responsible for developing governance frameworks and best practices for company-wide adoption, improving cloud outcomes, managing risk, and optimizing usage against costs. To build or manage a CCoE, it's essential to recognize that cloud adoption is a continual transformational process requiring a change in mindset and acceptance from stakeholders. Assessing current cloud operations, establishing a mandate, building a team with strong technical expertise, promoting cloud best practices through education programs, and leveraging KPIs and reporting tools are key resources to consider. Cloud resource automation tools can help maximize CCoE support for continual transformation by continuously improving tasks and optimizing cloud strategy, outcomes, risk management, and spend.