As I’ve discovered—and described in my last post—CIOs are much more concerned about how to deliver IT as a service (ITaaS) to the business faster and more transparently than they are about cloud infrastructure. So what are the challenges to doing that? In my conversations with them, they all talked about over hauling the structure and processes of their organizations—and the need to build or attract new skill sets.
As one executive told me, “People and process are huge challenges. The required skillsets are different from traditional IT. People need to be more script-savvy. Server people have to understand more about storage, network architecture and so on. We even created a new job description called ‘virtual platform administrator.’”
A private cloud is by far the most popular approach to providing ITaaS. Private cloud deployments provide the stability, control and security that companies need, but it’s not easy to get there. The technology journey is complex. There are no out-of-the-box solutions—at least not yet. No instant gratification.
And even if there was, at least on the cloud infrastructure side, reskilling staff and restructuring the organization take time. In traditional IT, everything’s vertical. You have a storage team, a compute team, a network team. You have a system administrator team. And a database team.
With cloud computing, everything is horizontal.You have a cloud services architecture team and all of the infrastructure is abstracted and virtualized, so everybody works across functions. If you don’t do that, then you actually don’t get the transformational benefits of cloud. You’ve bought the infrastructure, but you haven’t really done anything with it.
There’s also the cultural barrier. If you’re going to provide transparency and self-service to business users who’ve never had it before—like they’re shopping online to order IT as a service—that’s a big change. You have to be ready to handle that. It means IT really needs a salesforce. They’ve got to build a services catalogue, market it, and be good salespeople. If they’re not, the business won’t use their services. And then they can’t afford to exist and they get outsourced. It’s a completely different game.
And everyone’s role changes, including the CTO. The CTO becomes the chief broker of the workload.That’s the job: how to prioritize, understand workloads and applications, provide the right solution for each, and manage them.
Even once this transformation is complete, companies can have difficulty retaining skilled cloud personnel. “It’s a hybrid skillset,” a publishing executive confided. “These people are rare and in demand. I’ve lost a few because they got better offers. Sometimes we have to go to service providers because we can’t keep the talent in house.”
Given the complexity of the transformative task, it’s no wonder public cloud solutions can seem more attractive. It still requires work for IT, but not the long-term organizational re-engineering that can come with a private cloud initiative. The implementation is less involved and carries a lighter organizational footprint while providing comparable service levels. That’s why many executives find that a hybrid approach, which combines private cloud deployments and public cloud services, delivers the greatest value and most effective path to ITaaS success. I’ll explore that in more detail with my next post.
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