Turning Cloud Chaos into Coordination: How a National Organisation Got Control of 100,000 Servers

Cloud Centre of Excellence for a Large National Organisation

The challenge

A major public sector organisation with a large and fragmented on-premise estate needed to move to a coherent cloud strategy. The organisation was running the equivalent of 100,000 servers and had multiple independent cloud initiatives under way with no central coordination, leading to duplicated cost, inconsistent security, and knowledge that was being re-learnt on each project rather than shared.

What we did

Aire Logic was engaged to lead the discovery and design of a Cloud Centre of Excellence, covering the current-state assessment, the business case for the programme, reference architectures for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS workloads, governance guardrails, vendor management, and the operating model for how the CoE would serve the wider organisation. The work covered cloud migration decision frameworks, IaC provisioning standards, security architecture for cloud environments, and engagement models to ensure the CoE was seen as enabling rather than bureaucratic.

People and change

A key finding was that the transition was as much a change management challenge as a technical one. Existing teams perceived cloud as data centre off-premise rather than understanding the elasticity, automation, and cost optimisation opportunities available. The engagement model was designed to surface real-life migration candidates early and use them to build credibility and shared understanding across the organisation. The team brought AWS and Azure certified architects alongside enterprise architects, integration specialists, and service designers.