Centralized Operating Model

The decentralized operating model prioritizes quick innovation over centralized control. The centralized operating model focuses on centralized control rather than rapid innovation. In the centralized operating model, the CCoE team is responsible for centrally building and maintaining Landing Zone, including key components like the backbone network, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and compliance audit systems on the cloud. Furthermore, the CCoE team enforces centralized IT governance across the enterprise-wide cloud environment. All cloud resources required by service systems are centrally deployed and maintained by the CCoE team. This allows the team to efficiently identify public resources needed by each service system, ensuring they are deployed and managed in a unified manner. Additionally, all cloud resources of business units are managed centrally, with centralized security operations and cost management. This alleviates application teams from concerns about deploying and managing infrastructure or cloud resources, enabling them to focus solely on application design, development, testing, deployment, and O&M.

Figure 1 How the centralized operating model works

The centralized operating model offers several advantages.

• Centralized management: Centralized management ensures consistent security policies, compliance, and standardized processes, effectively reducing risks. When compared to decentralized management, it simplifies operations and enhances efficiency.
• Cost optimization: Unified construction of public resources, centralized procurement, and resource integration improve resource utilization and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
• A global view: The CCoE team monitors and analyzes enterprise-wide cloud resource usage, allowing for optimized resource configurations.

The centralized operating model also has its disadvantages.

• Lack of agility: All cloud resource requests must go through the CCoE team. This will slow down response times and affect service agility.
• Bottleneck risk: Overloading the CCoE team may otherwise prevent timely responses to the needs of individual business units, decreasing efficiency.
• Lack of business understanding: The CCoE team might not fully understand specific business scenarios, resulting in mismatched resource allocations.
• Hard to meet diverse requirements: Unified standards might fail to address the specific needs of different business units.

The centralized operating model is most suitable for service systems that are stable and rarely require updates, such as commercial software like Systems Applications and Products (SAP) or mature systems developed internally. This model is also appropriate for service systems that are constructed and maintained in a unified manner by the IT department.