The Hypothetical Cloud Organization
Does managing your technology assets in the cloud eliminate the need for certain teams, such as Operations, Customer Support, and Infrastructure, or processes involving human intervention or oversight?
Everyone who has heard of the cloud has heard some version of the following statement:
“The cloud will automate everything.”
That’s a very loaded statement that doesn’t contemplate the complexity of cloud environments or the shared responsibility model, and overlooks critical roles played by compliance and oversight teams in ensuring that cloud resources are used effectively and efficiently.
Even in a smaller organization, the functions fulfilled by formal teams in larger enterprises need to be adhered to in the cloud when managing your technology assets in that capacity.
Many support and operations teams and roles across the enterprise are just as important when you were on premise as when you were in the cloud. Keep reading to learn more about the ways these roles have evolved to support technology teams and cloud environments effectively.
Why it’s not feasible for cloud to solve your compliance and operations problems
We’ve heard countless promises from many different individuals about what the cloud can create efficiencies for, and eliminate entirely from your organizational structure. While the cloud does provide many benefits in this area, it’s important to remember it’s not a magic solution to all of your problems. Your cloud environment will only provide you with expenditure and resource efficiency gains if your environment is managed appropriately, is continuously evaluated for spend efficiency gains, and maintains an appropriate level of security within your organizational risk tolerance to not expose the enterprise to crippling profit loss from a breach of information. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done behind the scenes to make it all work seamlessly.
For starters, cloud strategy and governance are crucial to ensuring your cloud environment is optimized for your organization’s needs. Those are vague terms, but ask yourself two questions…
“Do we have a way to understand if we’re spending too much money on our technology assets? Is someone keeping tracking of our budget?”
“Do we know what data and tech assets we own? Is there someone responsible for making sure we do?”
This can include:
Choosing the right cloud provider
Developing and comprehensive cloud migration plan
Establishing clear policies and procedures for cloud usage
Without proper strategy and governance, you risk overspending on cloud resources or leaving your organization vulnerable to security breaches. All the areas talked about above require careful attention and expertise to ensure your cloud environment is running smoothly.
Keep reading to explore in depth details about how support teams and functions can significantly improve your cloud environment expenditures, security, and efficiency.
IT Strategy and Governance
The success of any cloud project depends heavily on the expertise and guidance of those responsible for IT strategy and governance. These individuals are responsible for developing and implementing the strategy, and ensuring it aligns with the organization’s business objectives and compliance requirements.
One of the key responsibilities of the IT strategy and governance function is to strike a balance between business objectives and compliance requirements. There is no reason this balancing act would change significantly moving technology assets from one environment to another. The responsibilities must shift to those who have expertise in your cloud environment.
The IT strategy and governance function should contemplate enforcement of policy and procedure that govern cloud usage at your organization. The most basic examples include:
Acceptable use policies
Are employees allowed to use your cloud environment for illegal activity? We’re guessing the answer is no, but it’s important to clarify what illegal activity is. This is where a policy document begins to form.
Data retention policies
If we keep data forever, our cloud costs will incrementally increase forever. Start by asking your teams what the cutoff is for data to be viable in production for use; that starts to define your business reasons for keeping information that you can weigh against the profit it generates. Bump that against your legal requirements for keeping data, and you can start to maximize your cloud storage efficiency by removing data no longer useful to you.
Incident response policies
Who does infosec call if they find an unauthorized actor on your network? You should be worried if they don’t know to immediately call your legal department. Knowing the basic steps and chain of command if something goes awry can save you millions down the line in response costs to a data breach.
Access control policies
We worked with a client once who got stuck in a conundrum where they realized that an entire division of an IT department had access to employee HR data, and that department was readily using that access to view future terminations of currently employed individuals. This client to this day has been unable to solve their access control issues, because bad access control policy and culture as displayed above was so heavily perpetuated throughout the organization, it is genuinely almost impossible to remedy.
Infrastructure
When migrating to the cloud, the infrastructure function plays a critical role in ensuring the cloud environment is properly configured and optimized for your needs.
This includes tasks such as:
Provisioning and managing virtual machines
Configuring networks and security groups
Setting up storage, and backup solutions
In an on-premise environment, the infrastructure team is responsible for:
Maintaining physical hardware
Ensuring the network is secure and optimized for performance
While many of these tasks carry over to the cloud, the infrastructure team must adapt to the unique characteristics and requirements of cloud computing.
For example…
In the cloud, the infrastructure team must focus on automating as many tasks as possible, without increasing risk to the business. This includes scaling resources up and down on demand.
This requires a different skill set than traditional on premise infrastructure management, because it involves working with tools such as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and Configuration Management Frameworks.
Additionally, the team must understand the unique security and compliance challenges associated with cloud computing. They must make sure all cloud resources are properly secured, and that access control policies are in place to prevent unauthorized access.
Typically, companies want to make the steps to make sure these security and compliance challenges are addressed, but it’s difficult to do so without understanding all of the assets that are in the cloud. This is where a security tool that evaluates the existing permissions and metadata of accounts can help these teams succeed in their endeavors.
The infrastructure team plays a critical role in the success of the use of cloud in an organization. By understanding the characteristics and requirements of cloud computing, and adapting skills and processes in a lean manner, they can help ensure the cloud environment is secure, optimized for performance, and aligned with business objectives.
Application Development
Application development teams are responsible for creating and maintaining software applications that run on the cloud environment. In order to do this, they need to have a deep understanding of cloud computing principles and best practices, along with a solid understanding of the specific cloud resources that are available to optimize cloud performance and resource usage. Your application developers will be most successful if they understand how to fundamentally maximize your cloud resource use on a day-to-day basis.
One key resource that application developers should be familiar with is the cloud provider's Application Programming Interface (API). APIs provide a way for developers to interact with cloud resources programmatically, allowing them to automate tasks such as scaling resources up and down based on demand, or provisioning new resources when needed.
Another important resource for application developers is the cloud provider's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. PaaS provides a complete environment for application development, including pre-configured runtime environments, integrated development tools, and automatic scaling and deployment capabilities. By using PaaS, application developers can focus on writing code, rather than managing infrastructure, and can deploy applications more quickly and with less effort.
In addition to APIs and PaaS, application developers should also be familiar with cloud-native development frameworks such as Serverless and Kubernetes. These frameworks provide a way to develop applications that are optimized for the cloud environment, and can help developers take full advantage of cloud resources such as serverless computing and containerization.
Finally, it's important for application developers to understand the importance of optimizing resource usage in the cloud environment. This includes techniques such as using caching to reduce the load on databases, optimizing code for parallel processing, and minimizing the use of legacy technologies that may not be well-suited to the cloud environment.
Security and Compliance
Security and compliance teams play a critical role in ensuring that the organization's cloud environment is secure and compliant with regulatory requirements. To achieve success, it's important for these teams to work closely with other roles within the organization, and to integrate security and compliance into the broader business strategy.
One key way that security and compliance teams can work with other roles is by establishing clear communication channels and collaborating on cloud security and compliance initiatives. For example, they can work with application developers to ensure that security is baked into the application development process, or they can work with infrastructure teams to ensure that cloud resources are properly secured and configured.
Another important way that security and compliance teams can integrate with the business is by aligning their efforts with business objectives. This involves understanding the organization's goals and priorities, and working to ensure that security and compliance initiatives support these objectives. For example, they can help the organization enter new markets by ensuring that cloud resources are compliant with local regulatory requirements, or they can help the organization reduce costs by optimizing resource usage and minimizing the risk of data breaches.
In addition to collaboration and alignment, security and compliance teams can also leverage cloud-specific tools and technologies to maximize resource efficiency and risk mitigation. For example, they can use automated security tools to scan cloud resources for vulnerabilities, or they can use analytics tools to monitor cloud usage and detect potential security incidents in real-time.
By working closely with other roles within the organization, aligning security and compliance initiatives with business objectives, and leveraging cloud-specific tools and technologies, security and compliance teams can help ensure that the organization's cloud environment is secure, compliant, and optimized for performance
Operations
Operations teams are responsible for maintaining the day-to-day operations of the cloud environment, including monitoring performance, troubleshooting issues, and ensuring that cloud resources are available and performing as expected. To achieve success, it's important for these teams to work closely with other roles within the organization, and to leverage cloud-specific tools and technologies to optimize performance and resource usage.
One key way that operations teams can work with other roles is by collaborating on cloud operations initiatives. For example, they can work with infrastructure teams to ensure that cloud resources are properly provisioned and configured, or they can work with application developers to ensure that applications are optimized for the cloud environment.
Another important way that operations teams can integrate with the business is by aligning their efforts with business objectives. This involves understanding the organization's goals and priorities, and working to ensure that operations initiatives support these objectives. For example, they can help the organization reduce costs by optimizing resource usage and automating routine tasks, or they can help the organization improve customer experience by ensuring that cloud resources are highly available and performant.
In addition to collaboration and alignment, operations teams can also leverage cloud-specific tools and technologies to optimize performance and resource usage. For example, they can use monitoring tools to track performance metrics and detect issues in real-time, or they can use automation tools to automate routine tasks such as patching and backup.
By working closely with other roles within the organization, aligning operations initiatives with business objectives, and leveraging cloud-specific tools and technologies, operations teams can help ensure that the organization's cloud environment is performing optimally, highly available, and aligned with business needs.
Customer Support
Customer support teams are the frontline representatives of the organization, tasked with providing end-users with the support they need to successfully use cloud services. To achieve success, it's important for these teams to work closely with other roles within the organization, and to leverage cloud-specific tools and technologies to provide efficient and effective support.
One key way that customer support teams can work with other roles is by collaborating on support initiatives. For example, they can work with application developers to understand common issues and provide effective solutions, or they can work with operations teams to ensure that cloud services are performing optimally and meeting end-user needs.
Another important way that customer support teams can integrate with the business is by aligning their efforts with business objectives. This involves understanding the organization's goals and priorities, and working to ensure that support initiatives support these objectives. For example, they can help the organization increase revenue by providing excellent support and driving customer loyalty, or they can help the organization reduce costs by streamlining support processes and reducing the time spent on support requests.
In addition to collaboration and alignment, customer support teams can also leverage cloud-specific tools and technologies to provide efficient and effective support. For example, they can use self-service portals or chatbots to provide quick and easy support options, or they can use analytics tools to identify common support issues and proactively address them.
By working closely with other roles within the organization, aligning support initiatives with business objectives, and leveraging cloud-specific tools and technologies, customer support teams can help ensure that end-users have a positive experience with cloud services, and that the organization is meeting its business goals and objectives.
See a common thread?
These teams are integral to ensuring that you have success managing your technology assets in the cloud. It’s important that you make sure you’re accounting for these functions within your team, no matter how large or small your organization is. You will only achieve success in your cloud environment when your employees are empowered to keep clear communication lines open between business strategy and support.
Nobody expects you to manage this alone, and we can help. Our cutting-edge products and services will take your legacy technology assets and propel them into 2023 with the proper security, protection, and governance to succeed as an organization.
