Davoud Dabbagh has been heading AG’s Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE) for a few months. Since joining AG in 2016 as a mainframe programmer, Davoud has progressed through various technical roles, from I&O network and security engineering to domain architecture with a focus on network security. His dedication to AG’s evolving cloud journey, combined with a strategic mindset, made him a natural fit for this position.
As the head of CCOE, Davoud leads a small but talented team that drives AG's cloud strategy and delivery . It is the job of this CCOE team to ensure agility, security, and optimal performance in cloud solutions, while streamlining cloud functionalities for IT AG’s departments and maintaining high availability and scalability across applications.
Driving force of Cloud Implementation
“As there’s a continuously huge growth in tech and data, there’s a business drive behind moving to the cloud - as service is most important, not the system. Through use of the cloud, we drive agility through automation, reusability and autonomy. With Cloud IT, organizations can deliver autonomy to application teams which translates into additional agility,” explains Davoud.
Cloudscape: Unique AG Cloud Infrastructure
AG’s cloud infrastructure is underpinned by Cloudscape, a comprehensive cloud service catalog hosted on the Cloudscape portal. This platform integrates a wide array of advanced features meticulously designed to ensure optimal flexibility, robust security, and significant cost-efficiency across cloud environments. One of the most distinctive and pioneering aspects of Cloudscape is its strategic implementation of enterprise landing zones—an advanced concept that facilitates the seamless deployment, governance, and scalability of cloud solutions. These landing zones are designed to support complex enterprise requirements, providing a secure and efficient foundation for modern cloud infrastructure.
These landing zones are environments in public cloud in which applications are deployed. They enable AG to manage applications with varied access needs—internal (employees only), online (customers and/or partners), or sandboxes (public and time-limited, cannot be combined with confidential data) for experimentation and proof of concepts. In addition to these three landing zone archetypes, there currently more under development. By establishing these landing zones in the cloud, applications can be deployed securely and quickly, optimized to suit different use cases from internal testing to public deployment.
Furthermore, pre-deployed and configured in each landing zone are transversal IT cloud platform services. These include network integration, vulnerability scanning, and identity management capabilities such as MFA, patching, encryption key management, monitoring capabilities, etc.
AG's cloud services provide IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service), allowing the best combination of resources to be assigned to each application. This setup ensures that AG can provide essential services without compromising efficiency, data security, or cost-effectiveness. As this is an ever-changing project, Davoud and his team are continually refining this framework.
Currently, the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) is primarily focused on implementing PaaS services, which aligns with AG's overall strategy. Additionally, AG Cloud includes Web Application Firewall (WAF) and threat prevention, with plans to introduce API Management (APIM) soon.
AG’s Forward-Focused Cloud Strategy
AG’s cloud strategy emphasizes operational excellence, customer satisfaction, and future-proofing. Central to this vision is naturally the landing zones initiative. By creating standardized, compliant, and secure landing zones, Davoud’s team provides self-service environments tailored for AG's diverse application requirements.
While Davoud and his CCOE team work hard to realize their currently planned strategies, they will continue with following their tried-and-true cloud FinOps framework throughout the journey – Plan, Track, Optimize, Empower. This ensures for data-driven, financially responsible decision-making in a timely manner.
Charting New Frontiers
As the CCOE Team ventures further into uncharted cloud territory from an IT standpoint, Davoud welcomes each new step with both enthusiasm and readiness. “With great power comes great responsibility,” confirms Davoud, knowing that he and his team are well-prepared to tackle the challenges and navigate the opportunities that lie ahead.
“I always knew that I wanted to grow into a managerial position at AG. The company fosters internal promotions. I therefore followed many of the trainings offered by AG that could help me to better understand strategy, process and business. AG basically trains you and gives you the tools you need. It’s up to you to choose how you grow,” explains Davoud. Adding, “As for the strategic mindset, this certainly comes from my family background!”