Get to know 8 core cloud team roles and responsibilities

In the spirit of product mindset, we encourage starting small and iterating as opposed to boiling the ocean. The model above can hopefully act as a framework to help you identify needs and areas of ownership within your own organization. Keep in mind that these areas of responsibility might shift over time as capabilities are implemented and added.

  • A key element in cloud success involves finding people with the right skills and expertise.
  • An organization that is aggressively migrating to cloud, for example, will focus on public-cloud-only services and design SRE teams to assist application development on the migration.
  • Compliance specialists are responsible for ensuring cloud governance and compliance with security standards and regulations.
  • Business leaders can handle project management, but they may not possess the skills and IT background needed to organize and manage the technical aspects of a cloud project.
  • All cloud migration projects must have stringent cloud security measures in place, such as cloud access security brokers and cloud workload protection platforms , that all team members are aware of and adhere to.
  • This structure can be helpful for organizations with a smaller size and a lower level of cloud adoption, as it allows for greater flexibility and autonomy among teams.

A cloud architect is a crucial role in the cloud team responsible for designing and implementing the overall cloud architecture. A cloud architect should have a deep understanding of various cloud technologies, services, and platforms. This includes public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms, cloud storage solutions, and networking. They should also understand the various cloud deployment models and be able to design and implement cloud solutions that meet the organization’s business objectives and outcomes. The cloud architect is responsible for creating the cloud strategy, planning for the migration of existing applications to the cloud, and ensuring that the cloud environment is scalable and secure. The cloud operations team structure can vary from one company to another, with different roles and responsibilities allocated based on their cloud migration project needs.

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They include infrastructure planning and deployment, cloud architecture design, security processes, and policies, as well as governance frameworks and compliance requirements, to name a few. When embarking on a cloud migration project, building and structuring the cloud operations team is critical to success. The team’s roles and responsibilities will vary depending on the size and scope of the project, but there are some key functions that every cloud operations team should have. A cloud security specialist sometimes oversees the architected infrastructure and software under development and ensure cloud accounts, resources, services and applications meet security standards. Security specialists also review activity logs, look for vulnerabilities, drive incident post-mortems and deliver recommendations for security improvements.

cloud operations team structure

That requires the creation and enforcement of policies that limit what users and applications can do in the public cloud. This ensures an application doesn’t end up using cloud resources when there is no return on investment. Applications like https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams are also necessary for teams to communicate quickly and efficiently, especially in a remote-first world. In the past, a developer could walk over to the operations team to ask about the status of an incident.

How to ensure cross-functional collaboration on your cloud team

They will be responsible for the recruitment process, starting with identifying or hiring the project manager. As a highly technical role requiring extensive experience, cloud architects must understand cloud service models , virtualization technologies, and cloud security principles. And as you might infer from the name, this group is itself composed of two subgroups. Infrastructure is about enabling product teams, and Reliability is about providing a first line of defense when it comes to triaging production incidents. This latter subgroup is, in and of itself, its own post and worthy of a separate discussion, so we’ll set that aside for another day. We are really focused on what a cloud infrastructure organization might look like.

Migrating to the cloud and keeping it running smoothly is not the time to “wing it.” You need to find the right people with the right skills, and you need to assign them to the right roles. If you are lucky, you can find these people within your own organization. But there’s nothing wrong with looking at outside resources to build your dream team. Ironically, both models can be used as an argument for “DevOps.” There are also cases to be made for either.

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They should work with SRE teams to understand the challenges in consuming these services. This process helps prevent infrastructure teams from developing solutions that no one needs. The team can offer a catalog of existing services and a road map of upcoming services or improvements. The cloud migration project will require a DevOps engineer to oversee the development teams, closing the gap between them and system administrators.

Operations also lead business predictability by helping the C-Suite plan KPIs and holding them financially accountable. Some ops professionals are specifically trained to neutralize legal issues, too. Bookmark these resources to learn about types of DevOps teams, or for ongoing updates about DevOps at Atlassian. Multiple service catalogs are the array of IT services that can be performed for different functions, such as HR, administrative, or finance. An example of a service category would be software, and a service could be software distribution for HR. Software Developer – Programmers and testers responsible for designing, coding, testing, tuning and scaling applications.

Constantly Invest in Building Soft and Technical Skills within Your Cloud Team

Teams need access to granular and recent metrics on reliability , response time , and cost . To get this level of insight, teams need CFO support and access to tools that can track financial and nonfinancial targets. Then teams can tie targets to specific tasks and product features to understand their performance and how they add value.

cloud operations team structure

As DevOps becomes more widespread, we often hear software teams are now DevOps teams. However, simply adding new tools or designating a team as DevOps is not enough to fully realize the benefits of DevOps. Different teams require different structures, depending on the broader context of the company. With end of support for our Server products fast approaching, create a winning plan for your Cloud migration with the Atlassian Migration Program.

Lift and Shift Migration – Use Cases and Steps for Migration

To realize the benefits of cloud, you must reframe your IT operating model by revisiting organizational structure, processes, and separation of duties. To also ensure business agility and solution vitality, a process of continuous improvement for critical operational capabilities is required and must be reflected in the operating model. Capability building can also help engineers gain depth of knowledge in critical areas such as code as software and build up breadth of knowledge by cross-training engineers .

cloud operations team structure

For example, a micro-services based application my require access to services on multiple clouds, leading to a multi-cloud approach whether desired or not. Cloud operations is the management, delivery and consumption of software in a computing environment where there is limited visibility into an app’s underlying infrastructure. This team structure, popularized by Google, is where a development team hands off a product to the Site Reliability Engineering team, who actually runs devops team structure the software. In this model, development teams provide logs and other artifacts to the SRE team to prove their software meets a sufficient standard for support from the SRE team. Development and SRE teams collaborate on operational criteria and SRE teams are empowered to ask developers to improve their code before production. This team structure assumes that development and operations sit together and operate on a singular team – acting as a united front with shared goals.

Design infrastructure services as products

DevOps improvements can bubble throughout the organization, helping to bring more reliable software applications to fruition faster, which leads to improved performance for the organization as a whole. Ultimately, DevOps helps improve the user experience for employee and customers alike. CloudOps tools can simplify automation of a broad range of everyday tasks including provisioning servers and storage, application testing, monitoring and reporting, application builds, and security event remediation. Cloud Operations relies heavily on analytics to enhance visibility of elements of the cloud environment, providing the insight needed to control resources and run services efficiently. Multi-Cloud made easy with a portfolio of cross-cloud services designed to build, operate, secure, and access applications on any cloud. Take a standardized approach to deliver high-quality products and services by establishing bite-sized, repeatable processes in which everyone knows their role.