Determining Your Staff’s Cloud Role

As IT moves to the cloud, IT leaders grapple with the question of how much IT staff should be allocated to cloud functions.  

Do you assign someone from IT full-time to a cloud to manage it? Or leave cloud management entirely up to the cloud vendor? Or do you strike some middle ground? 

No single strategy works for every situation, and yours will likely depend on the type of cloud services that you use, and how proprietary your data and applications are. 

Here is what we know: 

1. It’s never a prudent strategy to be ‘hands off’ with the cloud.  

Cloud providers, like other IT vendors, do their best for their clients when there is active and continuous interaction among all parties. The only way to ensure that this interaction occurs is for cloud customers to take the lead by, at minimum, creating quarterly meetings with each cloud provider. Individual contact persons, to which all issues should flow through, should be established both internally and at the cloud vendor so there can be issue coordination.  

Cloud customers and vendors should also be communicating regularly about matters such as services, products and support. Why do this? Cloud service providers have numerous clients, so it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle if you don’t establish and maintain active working relationships with your providers. 

Related:Cloud Migration Means Teamwork: Everyone’s Involved

2. Right-sizing IT preparedness is as important as right-sizing cloud services. 

IT determines which applications, data and other services it requires to move to the cloud, and then right-sizes the cloud resources to support the stack. Unfortunately, few IT departments think about the in-house staff resources that will be needed to work with the cloud on an ongoing basis. These realizations come up later, after the cloud service is already up and running. 

The preferred approach is to learn enough about the cloud environment you’re moving to in advance of implementation so you can right-size the skills and IT personnel that you’ll need to administer and oversee cloud operations.  

3. You might need a micromanagement strategy for the cloud. 

If you’re developing your own private cloud, or if you have applications and data that are so mission-critical that you want to place an employee at the cloud site to directly oversee operations, you are in the cloud “micromanagement” category. In this case, the levels of IT oversight and support in the cloud are as great as they would be for an on-premises data center. 

4. When to totally outsource IT to the cloud. 

 If you’re a very small company with limited IT staff, outsourcing applications and data to the cloud is a way to “gain” staff by letting the cloud manage your IT resources, backup, etc., for you. 

Related:8 Cloud Migration Challenges

However, you still need to oversee the process. Operations and support should meet the levels of performance and timeliness that you expect and define. The security and governance provided by the cloud should meet or exceed your company standards. It’s also a good practice to meet periodically with each cloud vendor so the two of you can review performance and discuss future plans and objectives. 

Another common case of total cloud outsourcing occurs when a user area procures cloud resources, often without IT’s knowledge. It’s unlikely that users will take the same care as IT to monitor performance, meet with cloud vendors, and worry about factors like security and governance. This is a prime reason why IT should be apprised of all new cloud procurements, even if the procurements are coming from user departments.  

5. Find the ideal cloud middle ground.  

The sweet spot of cloud management is to assign IT staff to cloud oversight so they can monitor cloud performance, configure cloud resources, and set security and governance in the cloud, all without leaving the data center. Most sites do this. 

Related:Getting Aggressive with Cloud Cybersecurity

IT staff must master the toolset for each cloud that various cloud providers use, and it’s important to have point personal contacts for both the cloud provider and IT, coupled with quarterly meetings to review performance. 

In some cloud implementations, IT will use a single tenant cloud deployment where the company is the only user of dedicated cloud resources. In other cases, the company might be in a multi-tenant cloud setup where it shares resources like storage and processing with other organizations, but it has its own virtual partition that segregates its data and applications from those of other companies. 

In both cases, IT staff should be savvy with cloud management tools so it can monitor performance and do its own fine-tuning. 

Concluding Remarks 

In June 2023, Microsoft posted an article discussing the many benefits of a multi-cloud environment, but also pointed out the need for companies “to quickly rethink their practices.”  Rethinking practices involves revising IT infrastructure, operations and developing relationships with cloud vendors. 

In my visits with CIOs at SMBs and large enterprises, most say these areas are still works in progress. Most of those CIOs state that they are still feeling their way around how best to position IT staff to work with a combination of on-premises and on-cloud resources.  

One short cut toward finding a solid middle ground is to envision how IT will interact with the cloud, what tools will staff need to master, and how IT infrastructure will change -- doing so before a contract is signed.