Building an Effective Cloud Operations Team for Your Cloud Migration Project

External cloud migration consultants can bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the table and can help you navigate the various challenges and considerations that come with moving to the cloud. Moreover, when needed, they can also help you with recruitment to help you fulfill all the necessary roles not only for the cloud migration but the future cloud management and maintenance tasks. Then, identify experts in cloud infrastructure, security, database, and software engineering to form the core of the cloud operations team. Once these roles have been filled, you can then bring on additional personnel depending on the specifics of your project and cloud migration goals. Depending on the company culture, words like “standards” and “opinionated” might be considered taboo.

We are really focused on what a cloud infrastructure organization might look like. Cloud architects often help to design applications so apps function effectively in the cloud. They can also be involved with the creation of an efficient, reliable cloud infrastructure that enables applications to achieve high availability.

Data Governance and Cloud Security Manager

However, there are also challenges to consider, such as the complexity of the migration process and the need to adapt to a new operating environment. In order to successfully migrate to the cloud, it is important to carefully plan and execute
each step of the migration process, including assessment, planning, execution, and ongoing management. This model is different from traditional operations in that it takes a product-mindset approach to providing solutions to internal customers. This means it’s important that the group is able to understand and empathize with the product teams they serve in order to identify areas for improvement. It also means productizing and automating traditional operations tasks while encouraging good patterns and practices. This is a radical departure from the way in which most operations teams normally operate.

We’ll continue using AWS to demonstrate, but the same applies across any cloud provider. Policies and processes guide the access and use of business data, and they protect that data from misuse, loss or theft. Cloud providers are working to accommodate major compliance standards, including HIPAA, PCI DSS and GDPR. Compliance specialists understand and monitor cloud compliance certifications and confer with legal staff.

Cloud Engineer

In that case, it may be a good idea to hire
external cloud migration consultants. Cloud migrations can be complex and involve many moving parts, and having experienced professionals on hand to guide you through the process can be invaluable. Cloud architects, who are responsible for designing and implementing cloud computing solutions, need to have a thorough understanding of software architecture and architecture patterns for a number of reasons. Those roles will vary depending on the cloud migration project and the cloud provider used. It’s important to understand that not every team shares the same goals, or will use the same practices and tools.

• But there’s nothing wrong with looking at outside resources to build your dream team.
• The need for physical equipment maintenance vanishes to be replaced with new troubleshooting, provisioning, and deployment skills.
• When building a cloud operations team, consider the individual skills of each member, as well as the collective experience and knowledge needed to pull off a cloud migration project successfully.
• Simply connect your cloud environment through third-party access to generate your full cloud infrastructure organized by cloud, region, compute instance, or other resources.

Cloud compliance is an ongoing process and team effort and requires regular reviews to ensure constant compliance with industry standards outlined in GDPR, FedRAMP, and PCI guidelines. While your CIOs and CTOs are heavily involved in cloud initiatives, they are rarely in the weeds. So, you will need somebody in a senior-level position who is well-respected, accessible, tech-savvy, and who will take ownership of—and champion for—your cloud needs.

Structuring a Cloud Infrastructure Organization

To get this level of insight, teams need CFO support and access to tools that can track financial and nonfinancial targets. Then teams can tie targets to specific tasks and product features to understand their performance and how they add value. On the operations side, SREs oversee incident management, keep track of service-level objectives and indicators, coordinate product releases, and perform such hands-on tasks as monitoring systems and resolving incidents. Cloud software developers are professional software developers who have the creativity and technical know-how to develop programs that are stored in the cloud.

An example of a service category would be software, and a service could be software distribution for HR. hurts application reliability and slows time to market. In fact, one of our clients had more than 300 I&O professionals implementing changes to production and pre-production environments. Detailed analysis of their critical incidents revealed that around one-third of outages were caused by human error. No matter how many checks and balances there are, human interventions cause errors.

Building an Effective Cloud Operations Team for Your Cloud Migration Project

The developer argument is better delivery velocity and innovation at a team level. The operations argument is better stability, risk management, and cost control. There’s also likely more potential for better consistency and throughput at an organization level. Ensure that the first and every application migrated has a clear definition of what tools, services, and data are required for successful operation, as this will scale out to become an operating map of dependencies for all operations. DevOps improvements can bubble throughout the organization, helping to bring more reliable software applications to fruition faster, which leads to improved performance for the organization as a whole.

It’s also good practice for the ops manager to include him- or herself in the rotation so they can keep tabs on what’s going on. If you want to run your ops team at peak efficiency, you’ll need to focus most of its bandwidth on projects. Projects save them running from emergency to emergency until they burn out, or from slowing down to deal with interruptions (a big productivity killer). Cloud architects should be able to think strategically and understand how different technical choices can impact an organization’s overall goals and objectives. They should be able to consider the long-term implications of different approaches and be able to recommend solutions that align with an organization’s business needs. Shana is a product marketer passionate about DevOps and what it means for teams of all shapes and sizes.

What is Cloud Operations (CloudOps)?

Maintaining security plays a role in preventing data breaches, as well as reducing downtime and outages. Cloud security managers should work with compliance specialists to proactively design architectures with compliance standards in mind, making security recommendations during devops organization structure architecture reviews or during post-mortems. Cloud engineers ensure that architects have properly designed the servers, and architects are the systems designers. Ironically, both models can be used as an argument for “DevOps.” There are also cases to be made for either.

There are usually multiple cloud engineers that will focus on specific areas of the cloud system. They may also be called a cloud software engineer, cloud security engineer, cloud systems engineer, cloud network engineer, or a database manager. One banking institution found that for every dollar it invested in engineering public and private cloud, it was investing $2.50 in operations.

The Operations Team Productivity: Roles and Responsibilities

As long as they cross-train all team members, you’ll always be able to cover unexpected absences. Operations might be responsible for keeping plenty of talent in the recruitment pipeline, promoting interdepartmental communication, supervising other teams’ activities, and figuring out how to best leverage resources to prevent and solve problems. Contact us today for further information about our cloud engineering services and more. The following four silos represent the most common operational and functional aspects of operations in OCI.