Typical Cloud knowledge in IT

From non-IT person perspective, cloud is just IT infrastructure hosted by somebody else. What can be the big difference? I found, that for IT staff, there are many.  It’s like when you have car mechanic, that is doing just BMW’s last ten years. And now he should immediately start to repair Tesla. Both are cars right? Shouldn’t be such a big difference ...

I’ve spent last two years helping one big corporation moving from fine-tunned local datacentres to run their applications and services in cloud. On the way, I’ve collected some experience that goes beyond the typical technical stuff.

Previous articles:

• Moving big corporation to cloud?
• Learnings on Cloud vs on Premise costs

The first obstacle you will challenge is the control. In cloud you are running on somebody else’s infrastructure, hosted usually abroad under different regulations. You can’t do the same things the same way you can do in your own data centre. You need somebody that will explain your IT staff how to do the same tasks in the new way.

The second obstacle is technology change. It’s still virtual server, database or storage. But you control them via different consoles. The terms are different. Even between different cloud providers the same technology is called with different names. Your people, including IT management needs to learn the new terminology.

The third obstacle are your IT vendors. Very often they already have some cloud technology experience. Very often better than your IT staff. So, they will push you, with very good arguments to follow their way how to do it. But then you can end with 10 different ways how to do the same thing: deploying the code, container technology, etc. You can’t avoid it 100%, but still, you need to have person that is able to explain your vendor how to deliver to cloud, following your standards and not bringing their own.

If I look from perspective of IT functions:

IT Architects: Very big change, they need to learn a lot of new things and get experience. It’s not just to do certification of Cloud Architect.

IT Analysts / solution architects: Not big change from my experience. Their strength is knowing the processes in systems, data flows and how it’s integrated to other systems. This is not directly impacted with moving to cloud.

Developers: Big change. Yes you can stick to the same technology. But if you really want to improve costs with cloud native functions, they need to program in different language and in different way.

Testers: Not big change from my experience.

IT Project managers: Not big change. They need to learn a new terminology but Waterfall or Agile, driving the project is still the same.

Administrators / Support Very big change. Everything they knew, were able to do is different now.

 My strong recommendation:

• It’s big change for IT organization. Be prepared for resistance, build ambassadors and most probably in 1-2 years up to 10% of IT staff will need to be replaced, because they will not cope with the change.
• Look for your existing IT people that are hungry for new tools and information. Start with them first.
• Have somebody who knows your existing IT processes, knows how it works in cloud and that will help our IT staff and IT Vendors to do their old tasks in new environment.

Do you agree with my estimation of impact on IT functions?

Did you have other function in IT that was heavily impacted?

If you want to consult your people change management, don’t hesitate to contact me.