Moving to Enterprise-Grade Cloud: Closing the IT Skills Gap

Ariel Maislos is CEO of Stratoscale.

The in-house expertise needed to manage a hybrid cloud that includes the use of AWS services can be quite considerable. The list includes:

Therefore, before beginning a transition, it is important to identify and understand your organization’s skills gap. This requires comparing your current system to the system you will migrate to, identifying areas where there is a skills shortage.

This requires bringing all of the business unit leaders in the organization to the table to consider the impacts the transition will have. Key personnel leaders here include the data center manager, IT operations manager, network managers, database admin leads, manager software development and the HR manager.

Step 1: Strategize

Preparation begins with asking the right people the right questions. Ask questions like where does the team stand in terms of cloud technologies? Do they have skills similar to those the cloud requires? If there is a skills gap, how big is it, and do we need to hire? Are there tools to bridge the skills gap? How excited is the team about the new platform? What is the cost impact? These are some of the questions that you need to ask to your in-house team. An optimal research process should give concrete answers to help create your strategy.

Step 2: Defining Skill Sets

Before approaching HR with any requests for new IT hires, you’ll need to spend some time outlining the skills necessary for the redefined and new job roles. Below is one example of a new role that might be required in your organization’s move to cloud.

Cloud Architect: The Cloud Architect must possess a strong understanding of how to design and build cloud environments to meet both performance and cost requirements. These people will already have data center management and architecting experience.

Key responsibilities:

Required Skills and Experience:

Other positions that may need to be filled when your enterprise moves to the cloud area an AWS migrations DevOps engineer, an AWS DevOps engineer, a cloud automation Engineer, a cloud security engineer and a cloud test automation engineer.

Step 3: Engage with HR

Based on strategy meetings and newly defined IT roles, you should be ready to create and deliver job descriptions to your human resources department. This should entail an in-person discussion with the head HR professional. Why? In many organizations, the human resources staff is not knowledgeable enough about tech matters to adequately recruit without input from IT. An in-person meeting and open dialogue gives the HR professional the opportunity to ask questions about certain job requirements. This is time well-spent.

Based on the current demand, HR managers may have to first look in-house to fill new roles. In the course of your discussions, you and HR may find that in some cases a current employee may already have the skill set to fulfill a new role. Together with the HR professional you may determine that it makes the most sense to hire from within, at which point you can prepare a training plan for collaborative growth. HR plays an important role in resolving the IT skill set gaps and report on the different options, so you can assemble a competent team.

Conclusion

Filling the skills gap will take time. Adequately transitioning and training current employees who are able to use cloud tools and technologies will certainly save time and money, enabling a quicker adoption. If that is not an option, you should hire new employees based on strategic planning and collaboration with HR, which will show the move to cloud was both carefully considered and executed.

Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton.

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.