Turn the cloud to your career advantage

What does the transition to cloud computing mean for the role of the IT director? For many, it will mean that managing information and IT will not require a working understanding of every server on site, but instead will demand  a more strategic view of the business and strong supplier management skills.

Mateen Greenway, chief technologist for EMEA public sector, HP Enterprise Services, believes the IT director’s skill set will have to shift from technical ability to strategic ability if cloud computing continues to gain traction in the enterprise.

“CIOs used to working on premise have a strong technical view of systems and a deep insight into products. A CIO with an on-premise infrastructure will have assembled the kit themselves, chosen the best-of-breed hardware and carried out implementations,” says Greenway.

A CIO will now have to understand what cloud offerings the business needs to achieve its short- and long-term goals, manage these contracts effectively and negotiate suitable service level agreements. The role will become more strategic.

“Moving away from that model is a shift. CIOs will have to adapt to a detailed management scenario, coming up with a set of strategic cloud services for purchase, integrating services levels and security and building relationships with partners,” he adds.

But many IT directors are still disconcerted by the idea of a third party managing their IT portfolio. According to Computing’s own research carried out in March this year, IT decision-makers are divided as to both the benefits of cloud computing and the challenge presented by managing an off-premise environment.

Some 49 per cent of respondents indicated that they would be happy to either manage some service levels from a cloud provider or that it would allow them to become more business and service focused.

However, 51 per cent said that they were either not convinced about the benefits of cloud services, or were worried they did not have the right skills, or felt that managing cloud providers was not their responsibility, or said they had no plans to put any IT into the cloud.

Cloud computing is also perceived by some respondents as a threat to the IT profession, with 11 per cent saying the model caused them to worry for the future of in-house IT staff.

This shows that a significant proportion of IT leaders are concerned about the managerial change that comes with cloud computing. However, Greenway also points out that an off-premise IT estate means an IT director has the advantage of sharing responsibility when things go wrong.

“I think it is going to be quite a challenge for CIOs. A lot of CIOs have come from a very technical background and moving into a purchasing services role is a very different state of mind,” he says. “However, buying services, and trusting somebody else to deliver them, means that a CIO will now have somebody else to share the risk with, which is a real advantage. But you do have to really trust that organisation to deliver,” he adds.

Hillingdon Council has implemented a private cloud solution, in partnership with ICT integrator Fordway Solutions, based on VMware server virtualisation, which has allowed it to reduce the number of production servers it requires from 94 to six.