Turning to the Clouds – “Cloud Transformation role changes”

By Suren

As more and more vendors begin to expand their packaged solution offerings around the cloud based architecture model, there are going to be more companies looking to cash in on the early discounts available on these packaged deals. Given that there are various factors that are likely to contribute to the success of the adoption of the new model, the "transformational changes" is key and the company need to embrace this new IT infrastructure model with some careful planning.

The nature of the model is such that it is likely that this will be embraced more by the business departments of a company as more IT roles will change as end-user computing requirements in an enterprise takes the lead. This would mean successful cloud transformation requires partnership between lines of business and the IT sub unit within the organisation.

 Gartner predicts that “By 2015, 35% of enterprise IT expenditures for most organizations will be managed outside IT department’s budget” this clearly highlights that the cultural shifts, combined with cloud as an enabler, have given end-users and business department more influence over IT infrastructure in the enterprise.

All this would likely mean that in the future the IT staff’s role in a business is going to change significantly from just supporting the business to developing transformation strategy by analyzing which applications can move to the cloud with least disruption and greatest benefit, for this the IT teams will have to evolve to be part of the business, leading to more cross-departmental functional IT staff, as previously mentioned in my article “IT Teams of the future”.

Therefore, when it come to your companies turn to move on to a cloud based model, make sure there is some careful planning around the transformation also keeping in mind the resulting changes in IT staff roles within the organisation. All the best.