Building an Effective Cloud Operations Team for Your Cloud Migration Project

Security specialists also review activity logs, look for vulnerabilities, drive incident post-mortems and deliver recommendations for security improvements. To realize the benefits of cloud, you must reframe your IT operating model by revisiting organizational structure, processes, and separation of duties. To also ensure business agility and solution vitality, a process of continuous improvement for critical operational capabilities is required and must cloud operations team structure be reflected in the operating model. A cloud operations team needs a highly respected person in a senior position in the business who is also tech-savvy to oversee the cloud migration project, provide guidance for cloud administrators, and communicate with all stakeholders. In the whitepaper, Building A Successful Cloud Operations And Governance Practice, I outline the critical role cloud operations plays in a CCoE and in the organization overall.

Hence, we recommend a proficient team structure based on a collective experience across different domains. According to the projects listed above, your cloud team can be a dynamic set of both technical and non-technical people with varying skills and knowledge. How you manage your cloud architecture will have a direct impact both positive and negative on your cloud environment.

Support for Server products ends February 15, 2024

Without this, it’s easy to end up with every team running their own unique messaging system, database, cache, or other piece of infrastructure. You’ll have lots of architecture astronauts on your hands, and they will need to be able to answer questions around things like high availability and disaster recovery. Even if there isn’t shared infrastructure, it’s valuable to have an opinionated set of technologies to consolidate institutional knowledge, tooling, patterns, and practices. This doesn’t have to act as a hard-and-fast rule, but it means teams should be able to make a good case for operating outside of the guard rails provided.

• The bank knew it needed to migrate to a cloud-ready infrastructure so that it could quickly develop and test new products, such as a mobile-payment system.
• These are critical components as they directly relate to the organization’s security and compliance posture.
• While the TO should include the standard functions of a good project-management office—such as setting goals and boundaries, planning, and tracking progress—it must reflect the greater scope of the effort.
• Many people see DevOps as simply development and operations working cohesively and collaborating together.
• The cloud architect is a senior IT member with solid knowledge and expertise of cloud applications, resources, services and operations.

Keep in mind, the team structures below take different forms depending on the size and maturity of a company. In reality, a combination of more than one structure, or one structure transforming into another, is often the best approach. When a software team is on the path to practicing DevOps, it’s important to understand that different teams require different structures, depending on the greater context of the company and its appetite for change. Building an IT infrastructure operating model for the future is a complex endeavor, but it is essential for companies that want to survive and thrive at the pace of digital.

RESOURCES

Cloud operations (CloudOps) are the tasks and processes that maintain cloud-based (including multi-cloud and hybrid) applications, workloads, and services, including the management of their implementation, performance, and optimization. Cloud operations (CloudOps) is the management, delivery and consumption of software in a computing environment where there is limited visibility into an app’s underlying infrastructure. In the enterprise, CloudOps uses the DevOps principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to create best practices for achieving high availability by refining and optimizing business processes that run in a public cloud. This team structure assumes that development and operations sit together and operate on a singular team – acting as a united front with shared goals. Occasionally called “NoOps”, this is commonly seen in technology companies with a single, primary digital product, like Facebook or Netflix. This can even take the form of “you build it, you run it”, with the same individuals developing and operating applications.

In fact, we used to refer to this group as Cloud Operations but have since moved away from that vernacular due to the connotation the word “operations” carries. This group is responsible for handling common low-level concerns, underlying subsystems management, and realizing efficiencies at an aggregate level. 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.

Benefits of AI in Banking and Finance

While the actual work a team performs daily will dictate the DevOps toolchain, you will need some type of software to tie together and coordinate the work between your team and the rest of the organization. Jira is a powerful tool that plans, tracks, and manages software development projects, keeping your immediate teammates and the extended organization in the loop on the status of your work. Another ingredient for success is a leader willing to evangelize DevOps to a team, collaborative teams, and the organization at large. It doesn’t have to be someone with “manager” in their title, but anyone willing to convince skeptical team members to start bridging the gap between their team and an outside team, whether it be developers, operations, or a platform team. The excellent work from the people at Team Topologies provides a starting point for how Atlassian views the different DevOps team approaches.

One of the biggest advantages of working in the cloud—being able to access data from anywhere—can also be one of the biggest disadvantages because of the time and resources required to ensure data flow and transmission is done securely. Typically a cloud architect will be in the weeds developing new designs and performing ongoing maintenance, but this person also might manage a team of architects and even serve as a liaison to engineers. The executive sponsor should develop a technology plan that gives decision-makers an estimated financial projection and should include a proposed budget and the resources that will be needed. However, they can’t make the decision alone and should consult the other members of the cloud team. Moreover, for many companies, the organization model I walked through above was the result of evolving and adapting as needs changed and less of a wholesale reorg.

Do Not Forget About Risk Management and Cloud Security

Enable consistent deployment, operations, and optimization of your apps and infrastructure. Accelerate and ensure the success of your generative AI initiatives with multi-cloud flexibility, choice, privacy and control. With those resources in place, you’re ready to think about the structure of the rest of the team. Bookmark these resources to learn about types of DevOps teams, or for ongoing updates about DevOps at Atlassian. Cloud systems analysts are responsible for monitoring the performance of your cloud systems. They work to guarantee that the system stays online so that service to customers is not interrupted.

The lack of the DevOps team’s business experience can result in misalignment with key business relationships, negative business impacts and an inconsistency in protecting the business as they prioritize on increasing the velocity of change. How do you transform these teams into a consolidated structure, driving a common vision and still meet the demands business has on IT? The combination of legacy Service Management and new Cloud skillsets can be a major accelerator to achieving success. Your cloud environment contains many moving parts with many people working at various levels. Diagram your cloud architecture to contextualize all those moving parts and visualize how everything fits together, what your current environment looks like, and what areas need attention.

How to build a successful cloud team

That means, for instance, working closely with HR to hire the right talent, collaborating with developers and business sponsors to deliver outcomes, and bringing in people with sufficient domain expertise to manage complex decisions. The ability to access data in the cloud from anywhere opens it up to the risk of security breaches, downtime, and outages. As such, in order to protect cloud data from unauthorized access, one of the most vital members of any cloud operations team is the data governance and cloud security manager. DevOps teams are usually made up of people with skills in both development and operations. Some team members can be stronger at writing code while others may be more skilled at operating and managing infrastructure.

Cloud management can require a vastly different skill set from on-premises data centers. The need for physical equipment maintenance vanishes to be replaced with new troubleshooting, provisioning, and deployment skills. In a tight labor market it may be beneficial to provide training for existing team members before the migration occurs to help ensure that all the proper skills are available when needed. Ops teams rarely come into direct contact with customers, but it’s still their responsibility to make sure the company delivers the right products to the right customers on time. The product team relies on operations to recommend improvements, as ops are best positioned to weigh customer feedback against the company’s capacity. If you think it’s time to scale your operations workforce, you’re in the right place.

Hire Nexocode as Your Experienced Cloud Migration Team

This group owns cloud spend across the organization and, as a result, is able to monitor cumulative usage and identify areas for optimization. This might look like implementing resource-tagging policies, managing Reserved Instances, or negotiating with AWS on committed spend agreements. Spend is one of the reasons large companies standardize on a single cloud platform, so it’s essential to have good visibility and ownership over this.

Get to know 8 core cloud team roles and responsibilities

An important goal of DevOps is to promote better communication between the two teams and build development pipelines that allow for continuous integration. The first pillar, abstraction, decouples management from the underlying infrastructure so that cloud machine instances, storage instances, security, network and governance can be managed through a single pane of glass. This centralized approach to management allows an administrator to use a single tool, such as Apigee, to manage applications and services running in the cloud. In this team structure, a team within the development team acts as a source of expertise for all things operations and does most of the interfacing with the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) team. This team structure is dependent on applications that run in a public cloud, since the IaaS team creates scalable, virtual services that the development team uses.

Development and SRE teams collaborate on operational criteria and SRE teams are empowered to ask developers to improve their code before production. The challenge many companies are running into is the inability of legacy Service Management teams to grasp how they can evolve to be part of the future solution. Also, as new DevOps teams are being established they are chartered with getting CI/CD moving as quickly as possible but, in many cases, they lack the knowledge of the underlying business processes and how they align to key applications.