When enterprises make the move to adopt public cloud services, an overhaul of their in-house IT teams’ functions is necessary. It’s not an easy or comfortable task. Gartner has outlined some key steps organisations can take in order to prepare their IT teams for the public cloud.
There is no denying the popularity of public cloud services and large organisations are using them to make their IT environments more agile and to keep up with the competition in our fast-paced digital economy. Often, they will take a hybrid cloud approach, combining private and public cloud resources.
But the introduction of public cloud to a company can have an enormous impact on internal IT teams since managing these services require different skillsets. According to Gartner research vice-president Andy Roswell-Jones:
“The arrival of public cloud services does not mean that in-house IT is going away any time soon. However, it does demand changes to IT governance and new roles and structures. Different skills are required.”
Public cloud shifts IT away from being a hands-on technical affair to focusing more on service management. While dedicated IT teams often focus on one technology area such as computing, storage or networking separately, public cloud adoption forces IT to be more holistic, Roswell-Jones said.
CIOs these days may want in-house IT to act as a single supplier manager to oversee services procured from public cloud providers. As such, he recommends organisations take the following actions to increase the structural maturity of their IT for public cloud adoptions:
- Management: Set up a public cloud advisory function to mediate between business units and cloud service providers.
- Operations: Beef up vendor management, introducing tools to model the impacts of service failure, supported by a steering committee that governs key public cloud adoption decisions.
You can read more about adjusting IT teams to a public cloud services model over at the Smarter With Gartner blog.
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