Cloud primer

Existing model

The roles and skills to manage an on-premises estate have not changed significantly in recent years. The roles have been set for some time, with the introduction of virtualisation technologies (virtual servers) being the last major disruptor.

For most organisations, managing their existing services and infrastructure requires a combination of the roles outlined below.

For specialist skills that fall outside these common roles, organisations partner with consultancies to implement requirements and perform knowledge transfer to internal team(s).

Cloud service model

Designing, building and operating cloud services changes the skills requirement for your organisation. These changes, by role, are outlined below.

Developing services to take full advantage of the cloud requires your organisation to adopt new development practices and operating models. Your existing applications and services – especially legacy deployments – must be modernised, or re-architected to run efficiently using public cloud services. It is likely that these skills don’t currently exist at scale within your organisation.

The roles of your internal teams are likely to change over time as your organisation progressively migrates services to the cloud and your deployment of services on-premises is reduced. Despite this progressive change, most organisations will continue delivering services on-premises for some time to come, which will require the continuation of existing processes, on a smaller scale, for the foreseeable future.