Cloud Services. What is Changing for IT, Operations and Service Managers

Written by Mark O’Loughlin

You probably already know that cloud service providers are using the latest in technology and IT platforms available to deliver services to their consumers and client organisations.

By leveraging and using cloud services organizations have access to the latest in IT technology, without the associated costs of ownership, maintenance and upgrading. This supports organisations in their endeavours to drive down costs, gain competitive advantage, increase sales and to provide superior services themselves.

You probably don’t know that when moving to the cloud only a portion of the management and operational activities associated with supporting the IT infrastructure will move to the cloud service provider. It is unlikely that the organisation will see or have any interaction with any of these cloud management activities which is to be expected because you are now receiving Infrastructure, Platform and Software as-a-service where these management activities are included in that service.

This means that, for example, public cloud providers will not provide root cause analysis (RCA) for problems affecting their clients and end-users. Nor will the client be made aware of incidents and changes occurring in the cloud providers environments.

Priority resolution times are generally not provided by public cloud service providers, who favour providing cloud services to availability service levels instead. This is different to the ITIL approach of using urgency and impact to define the priority, which then defines the different levels of resolution and fix times for incidents and major incidents.

Also, responsibility rests with the client organisation who must now architect their services taking the cloud service providers contract into consideration in order to meet the cloud service providers definition of 1) availability and 2) unavailability of a cloud service, not the client’s definition.

It also means that it is very difficult, and in some instances impossible, to negotiate a contact with a public cloud provider. This is to allow the public cloud provider to be able to provide a general as-a-Service offering to a global market. Generic cloud services tend to lead to lower costs services at the expense of less flexibility for both organisations and their end-users.

The Professional Cloud Service Manager (PCSM) course from the Cloud Credential Council (CCC) provides guidance on understanding the significant shifts from how Traditional IT was managed to how cloud services are designed, built, operated and managed today. Using a modular approach PCSM covers the following:

• Cloud Service Management Fundamentals
• Cloud Service Management Roles
• Cloud Service Strategy
• Cloud Service Design, Deployment and Migration
• Cloud Service Management
• Cloud Service Economics
• Cloud Service Governance
• Showing the Value of Cloud Services to the Business
• Popular Service Management Frameworks

So, ask yourself some simple questions:

• Do you really know what is changing in your industry and how that will affect your current role?
• Do you know how to upskill to remain relevant and to deliver value in the digital age?
• RU Digital Ready?

About the Cloud Credential Council

The Cloud Credential Council (CCC) is a global community driven organization that empowers companies in their digital transformation journey. We do this by offering vendor-neutral certification for IT Professionals including Cloud, Big Data, and IoT.

The CCC Cloud Certification Program enables IT Professionals to maximize the benefits of cloud solutions within their organizations.