There’s no question that the cloud has forever changed the IT environment. According to the State of the CIO 2017, a new report from research firm IDG, the increasing adoption of cloud services has made IT departments more efficient, reducing the amount of time spent on traditional IT tasks. This allows chief information officers to spend more time with company executives and line-of-business managers developing and executing IT strategy.
It’s important to note, however, that no one is suggesting the CIO’s role will go away, that IT departments will go away, that everything can be outsourced to cloud providers. The CIO is still tasked with managing costs, negotiating with vendors and ensuring that the in-house IT environment can support cloud services. In other words, the CIO must ensure that all IT services — in-house or cloud-based — align with the organization’s business strategy. The IT department must execute on that strategy through ongoing management and support.
If you don’t have a background in IT, this might come as a surprise. You might think that the cloud is a silver bullet that can solve all of your IT problems. However, if you don’t put enough thought into which applications and services should move to the cloud and how you will manage them, you’ll end up transferring your problems offsite, making them more difficult to correct.
It’s important to understand these three realities of the cloud:
- You won’t be able to move every application to the cloud. Some applications need to remain onsite to meet performance requirements, for security and regulatory compliance reasons, or because there isn’t a good cloud option. That means you’ll still have in-house applications to manage.
- When you do move applications to the cloud, your network infrastructure becomes your lifeline. If you lose Internet connectivity, you’ve lost access to your applications and data. Network monitoring and management are more critical than ever.
- The applications that you do move to the cloud won’t manage themselves. The cloud provider is not responsible for everything. (More on that in a future post.) Someone needs to keep an eye on whatever is in the cloud and make sure it is working properly. Someone also has to make sure your data is protected.
If you don’t have in-house IT staff, it makes sense to outsource these tasks to a managed services provider (MSP). The MSP will assume responsibility for monitoring and maintenance of your in-house systems, network, data storage and backup, and security controls. The MSP can also serve as your virtual CIO, helping determine what services should be moved to the cloud, and coordinating the implementation of those services.
The cloud offers many business benefits. It enables you to conserve capital, implement IT services quickly, scale on demand, and try new applications with minimal risk. However, the cloud doesn’t eliminate the need for in-house IT infrastructure, and your cloud provider is only obligated to provide the services that are spelled out in your agreement.
An MSP provides a valuable support tier between your in-house infrastructure and the cloud, helping to ensuring that all of your applications and services are meeting your business objectives. Let Verteks help you manage your IT infrastructure and operations so you can focus on running your business.
