More often than not, concerns around cloud adoption are actually questions relating to job security of the IT staff once the company decides to adopt cloud. This is a misconception which none other than the IT departments who have gone through the transition can confirm. What these system administrators have learned the hard way is that Cloud is not their enemy; in fact, it simplifies their job and adds further value by providing an opportunity to initiate exciting new cloud services and projects for the company.
With your company’s applications, data and infrastructure moving to the cloud, you won’t be left with nothing to do. On the contrary, you will now be able to deliver more value to your company by delivering the “cloud promise” to the end user – your enterprise colleagues. While the cloud takes care of the backups, failover and application support, you can get busy fine-tuning your existing SaaS application portfolio, monitoring and managing load and most importantly, initiating new Cloud apps projects within your company. If you observe closely, cloud is mostly replacing tasks which you weren’t doing anyway – manual installations for example.
Some of the tasks which will not become obsolete once your company shifts to the cloud:
You will still be managing your network, just differently. Instead of keeping an eye on the servers humming in the datacenter, you will now be ensuring availability between your company’s internal network and the cloud.
Your company’s lifeblood is now on the cloud – the enterprise apps as well as the data. Now instead of dealing with your Internet Service Provider, you will now be dealing with your cloud provider/s to make sure all your SaaS applications remain up and running. This will also involve helping IT team with new feature integrations and customizations and if your company has a hybrid cloud strategy, you will most probably be deeply involved in
managing cloud provisioning, SaaS application discovery and keeping your application portfolio up and running. This is no easy feat and migration to the cloud opens up the requirement to have a Cloud-administrator in-house since this is something which cannot be bundled and sent to the cloud along with infrastructure and services.
With all the new apps now sitting on the cloud, your company’s workforce will need to be trained to make the adoption as smooth as possible. IT department will be the key to ensure not only a safe transition but improving employee productivity by training them on the cloud platform.
Your company’s move to the cloud is your opportunity to equip yourself with the right skills and hands-on experience necessary to survive and thrive in this changed world.
By Syed Raza
