How to Create a Successful Cloud Team

While your admins might have virtualization experience, transitioning to a cloud-first IT strategy involves a real paradigm shift across your entire IT team. You’ve heard some of this before: you’ll be more agile, your team will be focused on service delivery instead of hardware, you’ll work on business issues rather than break/fix.

What you may not have considered are how the roles of your new cloud team may shift from previous responsibilities, or just how far reaching the culture change may be. Here are some tips to build a successful cloud service team within your organization.

Cultural Changes on the I.T. Team

When you don’t have a data center to take care of, the IT team must focus itself on service delivery. How are you solving the problems your users face every day when they interact with technology? How are you making the business a more efficient and effective organization?

Your entire team must therefore be customer-oriented while they deal with the introduction, maintenance, administration, and eventual decommissioning of IT services. Every IT service must be able to prove its value to the business and it must be demand-driven. This is how you get ahead of shadow IT: deliver the systems users request, rather than providing the solutions that you believe are the best answer. IT management should have regular road map meetings with other stakeholders and managers in order to keep IT services aligned with current business objectives. If you don’t already have a method for users to provide feedback to IT, implement one.

Your team will be taking on new and adjusted roles within the cloud paradigm, and as such they must be collaborative throughout the design, architecture, and maintenance processes. Part of this might involve a service team within your IT team that helps coordinate and streamline. What is each unit working on this week? This quarter? What work can be reused for another project? What templates can be created?

This helps lead to an agile culture that is able to adjust infrastructure on the fly to respond to the business. Continuous improvement is the name of the game.

Cloud Infrastructure Team Roles

Even if you aren’t operating a data center in the traditional sense, you still need to have infrastructure-focused units. The Cloud Infrastructure team combines infrastructure, operations, governance, any remaining data center operations, architects, security, storage, networking, and help desk teams into an ecosystem that helps build and maintain the virtualized platform.

The ultimate goal is to design, deploy, operate, and modify cloud infrastructure in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Whether you’re using on-premise virtualization or a combination of cloud providers, the cloud infrastructure team doles out cloud infrastructure to the cloud service team.

Roles within the cloud infrastructure team may include Cloud Architects, Cloud Engineers, System Analysts, System Administrators, Developers, and Business Managers/Cloud Executives.

A Cloud Architect develops and performs ongoing maintenance for architecture and design of the cloud environment, keeping design in line with the overall business IT standards and working with other stakeholders to keep cloud architecture aligned with service tiers, internal SLAs, and business goals.

A Cloud Engineer designs and maintains the cloud infrastructure components, including network design, virtual machine resource allocation, storage, and security. Different engineers may focus on specific areas within the overall engineering category.

Data Center Operations teams maintain your remaining hardware, network, storage, and supporting physical IT infrastructure assets, making sure power is allocated and maintained, keeping components redundant for better uptime, and ensuring the cloud platform is functional, meeting minimum system requirements and adding new infrastructure as needed to support cloud services.

Analysts monitor performance and security of the system to guarantee uptime and avoid threats. They alert the engineering team of capacity problems or security holes before they have the chance to hurt service delivery.

Administrators provide ongoing administration as well as support within the cloud environment, including using any portals to manage VMs. While the architect designs the overall framework and the engineer makes the technology fit the framework, the administrator performs the more daily tasks within that functioning framework.

Developers integrate different cloud services through their APIs or provide custom application development within your cloud.

Finally, the business manager and/or executive keeps an eye on the cost of cloud services as well as their impact on the bottom line of the business. This includes keep track of overall cloud spending, chargebacks, SLAs with service providers, contract, and licensing.