CLOUD MIGRATION JOURNEY — SKILL GAPS and TEAM PREP is a key part of cloud adoption readiness

There are a lot of dangers in creating a “digital transformation” strategy if foundational layers are not strong enough to support the huge amount of change expected. One of the foundation layers of transformation planning is human resources and skills available in those already on the team. In particular, cloud migration strategy puts the existing IT talent in focus and demands honest understanding and a commitment to upskilling and gap assessments.

One of the fastest ways to kill IT team morale is to bring in outside consultants and push the legacy roles to the side while planning cloud greenfield projects. If you can take your legacy IT team and map their gaps, growth, and support of cloud transformation tasks you often end up with loyalty and energy that gives you an advantage. You likely will need outside help, but if done with a hybrid approach you can build great IT migration teams.

• Network engineers can pivot to cloud networking and should discover it is more powerful and secure when designed properly
• Support engineers can pivot to cloud monitoring and SRE roles and discover it too is more powerful and efficient when automated and designed properly
• Security experts can pivot to huge increases in available security layers and the ability to use newer cloud-friendly models such as zero-trust and password-free technologies for example
• DBAs can pivot to cloud data offerings and find great improvements over traditional database performance, security, DR/HA, and integration designs

People are an important part of a good IT transformation, and realistically there will be resources who don't want to make the pivot needed, but years of company knowledge can be fostered to move a company forward for those ready to help.

Focus on skills review and assessment against the cloud migration roles, and work to promote self-improvement and people training as you prepare your cloud adoption and migration plans!