Hello and welcome to this lecture.

Following a strategy whereby a new technology will be implemented whereby it may create new roles, make existing roles redundant and open up opportunities for employees to follow a new career direction, then you can expect that there will be a number of effects on your employees when it comes to adopting the cloud. Let's take a look at some of those.

Roles and opportunities.

Cloud adoption and migration can open up a new world of opportunities to your existing employees. New roles are likely to be created to help architect, implement, and support this new environment. However, not everyone may be as keen as you'd hoped.

You might have an instance whereby existing personnel are not interested in cloud computing, and do not want to pursue this as a part of their career. This is difficult to resolve from a business perspective, especially if the employee is one of your stronger members within the team with regards to their ability.

Depending on the scale of your cloud adoption, you may have to create an entirely new team specifically to manage the cloud environment from concept to operations. However, it's also likely you'll still have some resources on-premise which will need to be managed.

If there's a division within your team with regards to willingness to learn the new cloud principles, then you could split your operational support teams between on-premise and cloud. However, if you have a situation where you have too many employees in one area, then you may need to offer another role more suited to the employee.

If they still refuse to accept this change of role, then you may unfortunately need to resort to redundancy if their existing job role simply no longer exists within the business.

There's an unfortunate trade-off that sometimes comes with cloud computing, in that many of the services that were provided on-premise can easily be replicated in the cloud with a lot of the management and administration being taken care of by the provider.

As a result this can lead to existing roles within the organization becoming redundant. As a business, I would always encourage your existing personnel to take up any training offered in the foresight of utilizing this skillset elsewhere to avoid such actions.

One department that may be particularly affected by this is the data center team. Hosts will be moved from the data center and migrated to the cloud, and any future resource requests for certain services will be created within the cloud.

As a result, the footprint of the technical hole will reduce along with a rate at which the data center will grow. This will ultimately result in a reduction of personnel required to manage their environment.

As an example of a change of job role, you may have a data center architect familiar with Cisco network design, Check Point Security, Microsoft implementations and storage and backup solutions. However, you now require that same person to architect all of these solutions within the cloud.

Despite all of their current knowledge, this would not be possible without further training. They may understand specific principles, but many principles to do with networking and connectivity differ within the cloud.

If you were using AWS, then it would be advisable for them to become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect to understand how to implement such solutions.

Reassurance to your technical teams should be given at all times as to the safety of their roles if it exists. Communication is clear at this point and a development path should be made available to all if additional training is required. You will want to retain your key personnel and retrain others to ensure all have a key role to play.

Retraining existing personnel is sometimes easier than sourcing talent from outside of your organization as they will have already business awareness and you know their reliability and personality, and how they interact with the team around them.

Sometimes finding someone to fit in with a team is a difficult task. Even if they have the required skillset, they may not function with the rest of the department, which could cause a negative effect.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't look outside of your organization as there will be times when you do need to source additional expertise perhaps due to time constraints of implementation or you require an expert within a specific area, such as a security specialist.

Training.

There's an obvious topic that springs to mind when looking at cloud adoption and migration from a personnel perspective, and that is education and training. Now there is more to training than that of the pure technical cloud content for your engineering and deployment teams.

Remember in the previous lecture where I briefly touched on business awareness? Well, here there was a requirement to educate and provide some form of training to everyone within the organization. Many people outside of the technical teams may not be aware of cloud computing is, why many people are using it, what it offers, the advantages and the benefits and why your business is looking to harness the power of the cloud.

I also mentioned that it's important for everyone to understand why this change of strategy is being adopted within your organization. Therefore, whilst investing training in your technical team's ability to handle the migration and ongoing support of that environment, you also need to offer some basic cloud principles and understanding and awareness to the rest of your organization.

There will be those who wish to gain an understanding of the technology that your company is wanting to implement. The training doesn't have to be a deep technical dive of cloud computing, but at the very least an overview of what it is and the characteristics should be offered. This will help your employees understand why you are implementing this change within the business.

Now on the other hand, there's the technical training required for your existing technical IT teams that will be performing the implementation, management, and operational support of the infrastructure. As this may be your first migration, you may not have many personnel that have the desired and required skills to carry out such a task of migrating services to the cloud.

With this in mind, your training needs to happen months in advance to allow your engineers adequate time to learn, understand, and become familiar with the technology before they implement a full scale migration. I would suggest providing both vendor agnostic training covering the principles of cloud computing along with vendor specific training where deep focus on the services you have architected can be given.

You will need to define the key strengths and weaknesses of your team members and how they could be used for different roles within cloud computing. Ascertain if anyone already has experience with cloud computing and specifically knowledge around the public vendor that you're aiming to use.

Perhaps AWS, Azure, or Google, to name the market leaders. It would be advantageous to your business to encourage certification within these areas as this validates your team knowledge and ability.

For AWS there are five certifications across two levels, these being Associate and Professional. The three Associates are the entry level certifications and are what people usually begin with before taking the more advanced and difficult Professional level. More information on these certifications can be found on the link onscreen.

For Microsoft Azure, there are currently two certifications, and again more information on these certifications can be found with the link onscreen. It's best to perform a skills gap analysis to ensure you know which areas to train which employee. Start by looking at what skills are required for your cloud migration. Then compare those to the skills of the skillset of your existing team and identify the gaps.

Now you have this information, you can formulate the relevant training path to ensure your team is ready with the ability and knowledge to carry out the task at hand. More recently within the training industry, different trends have been noticed. More and more organizations are choosing to adopt online training, such as this course you are watching now.

It allows the student to watch at their own pace and to go back on specific parts they are unsure of. This can't be achieved with a classroom instructor-led training day. However, each offers strengths and so it's down to your organization as to how you implement this training.

If you are in a position where a number of team members require training, Cloud Academy offer an Enterprise Training Solution. We are able to help large organizations train their teams, prepare them for certifications, and inspire them with new technologies that they can use to build better products.

Professionals use Cloud Academy every day because of our regularly updated content, facilitates continuous learning. We support thousands of IT professionals and managers using Cloud Academy to stay on top of technology and to quickly learn cloud computing skills.

Our Enterprise Management Dashboard is a very efficient tool that allows the administrator to actually see their team's improvements and the effective work done on the platform. With our continuously growing libraries of training materials and multi-path approach to learning and self-testing, Cloud Academy is the perfect place for your team to build its technical skills.

All employees can independently access our platform, study at their own pace, and complete as many courses as they want without limits. We provide statistics and reports to help you monitor both individual and team progress.

Cloud Academy Enterprise subscription pay off over the long haul. Since we publish new courses and updates monthly, you're always getting access to new, up-to-date training. With Cloud Academy you'll stay on top of developing trends and technology, learn faster and better, invest directly in your team, save money on external consultant, and avoid expensive live seminar courses.

Mobility.

When adopting cloud services, it allows both employees and customers to access data from anywhere in the world as long you have an Internet connection and specific security controls allowing access.

With this in mind, your business can become flexible when it comes to your staff. The possibility of remote access and home working becomes more viable.

This also allows you to source talent from other areas of the country, or even different countries. If all systems are accessible via the cloud, then this is perfectly possible and feasible.

IT team contribution.

When systems and services are migrated to the cloud, it allows certain divisions within your IT department to spend more time focusing on business-orientated goals, such as IT strategy and innovation. As we know the cloud offers management, automation, self-healing architecture, and built-in monitoring features. It gives back time to engineers and developers, allowing them to direct their efforts into other areas.

This time can be spent advancing and updating existing releases, looking at IT industry strategies, and assessing how these could be implemented to the benefit of the business. In essence, less time will be spent on administering systems and instead the time can be better spent on enhancing existing and developing new services.

That brings us to the end of this lecture. Following next we'll discuss the financial impact of cloud adoption within the business.