Cloud is a fundamental change in how your data center operates, and it fundamentally changes the responsibilities of your data center staff. Planning for these changes should be part of your cloud migration planning.

Your Staff Will Do Less of This

Because many responsibilities are shared with the cloud provider or handled by them entirely, there are many functions your team will spend less time on. These include:

Routine maintenance and support, such as applying patches.

In most cloud models, the provider is responsible for applying patches and handling other routine server maintenance. You’ll lose the focus on physical resources.

Hardware troubleshooting.

Hardware failures aren’t your responsibility in the cloud. The provider will ensure that your virtual machines or storage fails over to working devices.

Network monitoring.

The cloud provider will support the network that connects infrastructure within their data center.

Your Staff Will Do More of This

There are some functions that will take more of your team’s time:

Tracking changes, data, and other resources.

With a traditional in-house data center, your team controls how and when changes are made. Shadow IT always hid some computing from central management. With cloud, users have self-service access to resources, instances can be started and stopped at any time, and data is easily accessed by multiple applications. Keeping track of all of this requires more effort than when nothing was changed without a signature from the change management team.

Security.

Don’t think that cloud means you’ll spend less time on security. The complexity of cloud, the many connections between resources in and out of the cloud, and the blurring of the network perimeter mean you need to rethink your security strategy and spend considerable time and effort ensuring data remains safe in the cloud.

Implementing automation.

Keeping up with the agility of the cloud requires automating procedures to ensure that appropriate security policies get applied to every new instance. Automation also helps you manage cloud spending by ensuring that instances are shut down at end of day.

Are you prepared to adapt to the operations changes that come with cloud? Cloud services from Prescient Solutions ensure the necessary cloud monitoring and management is performed effectively and efficiently. With more than 20 years providing IT consulting and managed services, our expert team is trusted by Chicago and Schaumburg-area businesses to provide critical IT solutions. Contact us to learn more about how Prescient Solutions can help you handle your IT needs in the cloud and in your data center.