Businesses are aware now (or they should be) that they should be considering migrating their applications to the cloud and the software defined data centre is now king.
The how when and what is being hotly debated by specialists all over the technology media columns, but what is going to happen to the IT organisation structure that must live with the post transformation. IT departments aren’t just going to completely disappear just because the infrastructure is no longer physical, semi virtual and on premise. The IT department must smarten up and evolve, CIO’s must realise the structure, culture and skill set changes required to support an on demand service orientated IT department as well as considering the technical and security implications of such a move.
I’ve seen organisations run their departments in a structured fashion of service desk 2nd line operation engineering support 3rd line support or build engineering all wrapped in Architecture and PMO and this worked fine back in the day, the infrastructure grew slowly everyone knew their place.
Engineers now need to be hybrid, network, platform, security conscious experts, in order to support service which is now the focus not infrastructure. Service managers need to be more informed about performance, outages, and most importantly capacity as it should flex to demands. Does this mean your IT department will change from dot com chic of polo t-shirt, baggy jeans technologists to service orientated suits? What about the scale of the IT department does that need to flex with the demand of the infrastructure. The future of flexible IT is here is the business ready to embrace the internal cultural and capability changes that must come with it?
Stephen Draper 