The drivers today for cloud migration are abundant, but one of the most common is the skills gap that many businesses experience with on-premises environments. The organizations that fall into this category tend to experience significant turnover and churn in their technology teams. For example, it’s not uncommon for CIOs and CTOs to stay with one company for only 12 to 24 months. Below them, the longevity shrinks even further.

The problem is that too often, businesses treat moving to the cloud as a one-time transaction

How the skills gap widens in the cloud

Types of partners to consider

On-premises, these businesses may have been limited by capability or capacity, but the risks were smaller with legacy IT. So how does one overcome this challenge? For many, the answer is finding a services provider that acts as a partner for the cloud journey.

When you embark on the cloud, it is only natural to seek a migration partner. The problem is that too often, businesses treat moving to the cloud as a one-time transaction, as if they only need a partner to get operations up and running.

For many however, the cloud represents a paradigm shift. If you fall into this category, you’ll likely need help in adjusting post-migration. Furthermore, part of the beauty of the cloud is that it is always growing and evolving. To grow and evolve with it, you need guidance throughout your entire cloud engagement.

Depending on the skills of your IT personnel, these are the types of services you can and should seek from a partner:

Managed services Managed services providers offer technical specialists to monitor, manage, and support your cloud workloads. This helps you save time, follow best practices to reduce operational costs, and free up resources to work on core, differentiating tasks. Many providers offer different tiers of service, depending on the level of your needs.

Professional services Professional services providers deploy dedicated experts to help you identify challenges in your existing IT environments, find drivers for adopting a new solution, and gauge the impact that solution will bring. From there, they provide consultation and expert guidance on how to implement the solution in the most seamless manner.

Staffing services For short-term projects, where it may not make sense to expand your internal IT staff with full-time employees, partners can provide personnel to serve both internal IT and end users in case issues arise. These personnel can be deployed in numerous roles, including service desks, desktop management, data center management, and more.

These businesses have a difficult time retaining quality resources and attracting new personnel that fit the bill. The frequent turnover creates technology challenges:

a new regime lacking baseline information, such as application dependencies and inventory, and an ownership without the knowledge it needs to transform and innovate. It’s no wonder moving workloads to the cloud is appealing in this situation. Having a cloud provider means that

someone else will refresh and upgrade hardware, while the business can focus on its core mission.The reality, however, is not so straightforward. In fact, without the right personnel, many organizations find that their IT skills gap widens when they move to the cloud.

One of the core values of the cloud is the innovative capabilities it provides. For example, in 2017, Microsoft announced more than 200 Azure updates, while also refreshing its roadmap with new plans. In the same time period, Amazon Web Services launched 1,430 new services and features, according to awsforbusiness.com.

But without the right IT personnel, one cannot exploit the value of these services, which inhibits the technology transformation the business was seeking when it migrated to the cloud. This effectively wipes out one of the core benefits of cloud migration. Worse, businesses in this situation run the risk of introducing their personnel to an IT environment they aren’t familiar with. This opens the door for a wide spectrum of issues, from operational inefficiencies and unexpected costs to an inability to properly secure workloads in this new distributed environment.

Not all partners are the same, however. In fact, there are some qualities you should seek – and inversely, avoid altogether – in your partner.

• Look for: Empathy. To provide the most value, cloud partners need to truly understand your business, how technology can extend its value and advantage, and what your end users expect in terms of experience. With this information, a partner can identify opportunities to implement new capabilities or upgrade existing ones when services and features are released.

• Avoid: Rigidity. Templates and methodologies can be especially helpful to accelerate projects, reduce costs, and ensure results. However, it is possible for these tools to be overly rigid and fail to account for your unique business needs. In this ‘one size fits all’ scenario, a partner may not be providing solutions that drive the most impact for your business or account for your core needs.

• Look for: Experience. While many start by migrating small workloads, down the road it only makes sense to move mission-critical workloads to the cloud. While the benefits are clear, there is also significant risk, so choosing a partner that has had success supporting critical data and applications is imperative.

• Avoid: Siloes. Often, cloud partners will have acquired other companies that operate autonomously to handle specific services. In other cases, partners will altogether outsource certain services to subcontractors. This raises a red flag, as this type of setup can create gaps between people and processes. When something goes wrong, end users and IT should not need to analyze root cause failure to determine who to call. In these situations, every minute counts and having readily available support is key.

What to look for (and avoid) in a partner

To thrive in the cloud, you must find a service provider that truly serves as your partner

For many businesses, the skills gap created by turnover in IT personnel is a significant issue and one that the cloud can help alleviate. But without the proper guidance, the cloud could end up widening that skills gap, inhibiting a true technology transformation and in the end, costing an organization. To thrive in the cloud, you must find a services provider that truly serves as your partner to support IT and end users through the entirety of your cloud journey. The right partner will help your business smoothly transition operations from on-premises to the cloud.

Once migrated, they should continually optimize your cloud environment to ensure cost-savings, efficiency, and security. As new services and features are released, this partner can help you implement these solutions to drive further value. With the right partner, cloud transformation is a reality for a wider variety of businesses.

Finding a partner to ease your cloud transformation

About the Author:Todd PekatsVice President of Cloud Computing,PCM Inc.

AZURE AND MODERN LICENSINGHOW MICROSOFT IS CHANGING THE WAY YOU BUY THE CLOUD

As organizations of all sizes try to keep up with ever changing technology trends, more and more companies are looking toward the cloud to help modernize their infrastructure, enable their internal teams, and lower costs. With an on-demand, pay-as-you-go consumption based model, the cloud can change IT departments from reactive cost centers with high capital expenditures to an agile business unit focused on aligning and delivering IT resources in an operational model.

While organizations confront the shift to cloud technologies, Microsoft is also modernizing the way that these technologies and services are delivered to the customer. The cloud is a journey, and making that journey alone comes with a lot of challenges in terms of knowledge, time, and money. Companies that make the journey best, and find value in the cloud fastest, are those that work with an experienced partner to help guide them through the process.

Organizations are experiencing a massive increase in the growth of data. The cloud is an excellent target for these growing datasets, taking advantage of lower cost storage, while allowing for near limitless scaling. The cloud also allows you to differentiate granularly between different data sets, taking very inexpensive archival storage for the classic “write once, read never” data, while enabling faster, more available storage for file or application data.

Data is the lifeblood of any organization, and protecting and securing data against breaches and natural or man-made disasters is a key function of many IT departments. While most organizations have some form of backup, many are still struggling to meet data backup best practices because of cost or management concerns.

Hardware, power/cooling, maintenance, these are all large expenses for any organization running a traditional datacenter. As legacy hardware comes up for refresh, or Colo contracts come up for renewal, lots of companies are turning to the cloud to get out of the business of purchasing and managing hardware and instead focus their efforts on providing value to their organizations and end users.

Cloud Based Storage Backup and Disaster Recovery Datacenter and Colo Migration

For more information, contact our PCM Microsoft team 1-800-700-1000 I www.pcm.com/azure-services

For more information, please visit www.pcm.com