Times of massive change can feel scary or uncertain—as we all know from the experiences of the past few years. It can feel that way at work, as well, particularly as businesses are going through massive digital transformations in one form or another. Will processes change? Will job functions and roles change? Will goals change? The answer for IT teams today is likely “yes” to all of those questions, as cloud computing strategies and models are now front and center.
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But the real question that emerges in times of change is: Will those responsible for the Old Technology lose their jobs? Past lessons say no; IBM is still training people on COBOL to keep systems running, and institutional IT knowledge never goes out of style. We’ve found in surveys that the majority of businesses plan to keep data centers up and running, as they add more and more cloud services and deploy to the edge.
When you’re creating and implementing a cloud strategy, the people involved will make or break its success. But you don’t need to hire a whole new staff of cloud experts. The teams you have now can evolve and grow to run an agile, cloud-based infrastructure that puts the customer first.
Figure out how to help your team members grow and learn
Today, when it comes to cloud, the shifts in technical roles can seem drastic. For many working in IT operations, for example, their titles and expertise are tightly aligned with the company’s existing tech siloes—so the networking team manages all things network, without necessarily collaborating with others in IT who work on storage, compute, or end-user support.
Your existing IT admins and operators have deep institutional knowledge, and they know already how to build highly complex systems at scale. While their current responsibilities, titles, and team structures might reflect the legacy environment you’re moving away from, these team members are the ones who can help take your environment forward.
At S&P Global Ratings, CTO Marcus Daley started a successful cloud migration, initially with just two cloud engineers on the IT team. He had encouraged those engineers to get certified, then encouraged the rest of the existing team to get certified in whatever they wanted. “We invested in our people, and that worked,” says Daley. “Everyone turned into a cloud engineer.” Using cloud helps engineering staff get to a higher level of performance, more easily able to provide a better experience for internal or external users. At the same time, Daley worked to create a culture of calculated risk-taking and troubleshooting, where team members can try new ideas, then figure out why they did or didn’t work.
There's plenty that’s translatable about classic IT roles like those at S&P. Traditional VI admins might parlay VMware vSphere events experience into event-driven automation, learning Kubernetes and Knative along the way. Or maybe site reliability engineering (SRE) has always been intriguing—learn about the skillset and mindset changes involved in the transition from admin to SRE. DevOps is another area for exploration for admins to see how to apply those principles to infrastructure management.
Aside from technological growth and development, Daley also recommends encouraging an agile, flexible multi-cloud mindset. That mindset is centered around problem solving, first understanding the capabilities needed vs. starting with a specific vendor’s products or solutions. He encouraged S&P’s teams to focus on a person for whom they needed to provide a great experience (standing on the street with a mobile phone), so that any project or task—no matter where in the stack—had a real person at the end of it.
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Instead of trying to translate servers and specs directly into cloud instances, he encouraged teams to take calculated risks to downsize infrastructure, such as by right-sizing machines and storage.
Another area of mindset shift and potential for growth is around cost. When you own your infrastructure, engineers don’t usually think of the costs associated with what they’re doing. In cloud, you do have to think about those costs. “If you reframe this as an opportunity to improve user experience, that encourages engineers to find creative ways to save costs, spin resources up and down, and generally have more reactive, real-time infrastructure,” says Daley.
Cloud computing and digital transformation offer a ton of potential, along with a ton of people and process changes. Embrace your staff—their experience and their institutional experience—to get to a modern state of business faster. Your experienced admins can take your service forward, building highly complex, scalable systems, just as they’ve built complex systems before.
Above all, don’t fear failure. Daley says that he often sees CTOs worry about the cost or other implications of taking a calculated risk. But, he says, “we’re engineers. We’re going to make this work. We’re going to have some failures, but how are we going to learn from them?”
Tips for CTOs building IT teams in a multi-cloud world
In conversations with CTOs about their multi-cloud experiences, we hear some common themes. These tips can help guide your team building and development:
1. Consult your sys admins before you create a cloud strategy. Take advantage of their broad institutional knowledge of the apps and their dependencies to ensure better outcomes.
2. Reconsider how you’re delivering the overall stack. Think teams, not technologies, and don’t lump sys admins in with tech you’re sunsetting. Consider desired outcomes and team structure instead to avoid continued siloes.
3. Encourage your teams to take risks. Trying new things and taking calculated risks is a great way to learn what works, and why.
4. Be realistic and specific about your cloud plans. Just as mainframes haven’t fully disappeared, neither will data centers or on-prem servers. Take into account the web of existing products to be better prepared to add new infrastructure in the cloud, such as IoT devices at the edge.
5. Err on the side of overcommunication. As you're creating and executing a broad modernization strategy, be clear throughout about the overall plan, and communicate openly and frequently to adjust as needed.
6. Help build a multi-cloud mindset. Instead of starting with a vendor and where their solutions might fit in, start with the problem you’re trying to solve and then explore capabilities that could help.
7. Never stop learning. VMware’s CTO, Kit Colbert, has navigated many career shifts over 18 years at VMware. Check out his professional development tips, including subscribing to tech newsletters, using Twitter to stay up to date, and spending some time each week to research new developments.