Our company decided to digitalize during quarantine. Our company does not have an IT department, so we turned to https://www.networklondon.co.uk/it-consultancy/ for effective digitalization, which was a good idea. These guys are real professionals, and with their help, we were able to get a lot of new customers. If not for them, our company would have gone bankrupt.

The next role that I want to highlight is a cloud service manager.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, the responsibilities for each role (and even the name) may be a little different depending on the organization or company.

Think of a cloud service manager as a visible role that could require some balance of business, management, and technical skills.

• Responsibilities may include:
• Define and manage services.
• Adjust the service portfolio to meet organizational or customer demand.
• Define pricing and tiering policies.
• Monitor efficiency of the pricing model.
• Ensure Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met.
• Enhance customer satisfaction

For example: Let's assume a company wants to determine if adding a robust database service offering in their private or hybrid cloud makes sense. Mary has been selected as the cloud service manager.

Mary and team will have to reach out to customers (who could be internal) to determine which database features are currently being used and others features that will be necessary or nice to have. They will likely research public cloud database offerings to determine the features, costs, etc. Maybe some internal teams are already using public cloud database services but the costs keep adding up.

Mary and team will have to determine what it would cost for the service to be built in-house, how many people would be needed, what the timeline would be, and how well would it fulfill the needs of the customers/internals. If building in-house makes sense and approval is given, Mary and team would be responsible for designing, building, launching and maintaining the service which would include working with people in roles that I previously posted about.

--Bob
#IWork4Dell

Removed by moderator

How do I get started?

Rather than replying to your specific situation, I am going to do a broader reply because this question is pretty common and I would image there might be others in this forum who are wondering the same thing.

However, it is a "complex" question and the quick answer is "It depends!" but I will explain.

The current technical depth of an individual is important as well as the desired potential role. If you read through my previous posts regarding the many typical cloud related roles, you will see that although most of the ones I provided focus on technical skills, some rely on business, project management, and leadership skills. There are also other organizational roles that require marketing, finance, and plenty of other skills (yes all still related to the cloud).

I teach in a Masters of IT program so most of my university students are already in some IT-related or IT-adjacent roles. Some have experience with one or more of the public cloud providers (AWS, Google, Azure...) but more than half don't. A majority of my students already have a strong technical background so their "STARTING POINT" is very different than someone just starting college or looking to make a career change.

On the other hand, the courses we offer at Dell and others available in the industry are usually classified as beginner, intermediate and expert levels. Most learning systems/catalogs have filter options to narrow down the course level, length, cost, etc. and some may have recommended "learning paths" and even certification tracks. (We have many cert tracks, including one for cloud).

For anyone who feels they are completely starting from zero, and you are not sure where to begin, browse our other discussion board threads for tidbits from some of our great instructors, or learn more about how some of the products work, or about the certification program, or about Dell's Learning hub, plus more. (https://www.dell.com/community/Education-Services/ct-p/ESEducation)

No matter what training you take, I strongly recommend that you start small, find some topics you are interested in, then look to see what learning paths they are associated with. For any technical topics, if you follow-up with hands-on labs they can really help re-enforce what you have learned.

For those of you who like to play, there are a bunch of books titled "Learn in a Month of Lunches "; I use three of them in my university courses because they have some helpful lab exercises. If you are enrolled in any college classes or still have access to school resources (I.E. a .edu email), ask your school if they have free or discounted access to electronic books. This is a great way to check out a book first to see if you like it.

--Bob
#IWork4Dell

The next role that I want to highlight is a cloud automation engineer

As I mentioned in my previous posts, the responsibilities for each role (and even the name) may be a little different depending on the organization or company.

This role requires a thorough understanding of software development, workflows, and processes as well as that of cloud infrastructure.

Here are some responsibilities of cloud automation engineer from our cloud courses:

• Understand cloud orchestration, automation, and integration.
• Design cloud service automation to move towards Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Lead cloud orchestration using IaC.
• Provide IT teams with self-service capabilities.
• Drive continuous integration and continuous delivery capabilities.
• Gather requirements to transform to Agile for cloud application delivery.
• Ensure that architectural standards, usability design standards, and global product-specific standards are met.
• Provide the necessary support and structure for on-boarding and off-boarding services

As you can tell by the responsibilities, this is a strong technical role.

Why is automation important? It helps processes to be standardized, efficient, and consistent. 

Let's consider a simple example:

Tom, a financial analyst needs to run normal end of the quarter software for his company.  The software requires two virtual machines with specific business tools, a database, and storage.  Tom always sends an email request to the IT team a few weeks in advance because sometimes the wrong tools are installed, or the database size or the storage is not what he requested, or the request takes a long time.  He found that it depends on who gets his request because everyone's process seems to be different.

What if Tom could go to a user interface provided by the IT department (I.E. a service catalog), and select an option called "End of Quarter Business Tools" and, in a short amount of time, he would receive access to the virtual machines, database and storage with everything that he needs.

To make that happen, what would have to be done?  First, would be to determine all the steps and processes required, and the most efficient way or do them.  Then figuring out how they could be automated.  There are programming interfaces for infrastructure so, depending on what compute, storage, database, and networking technology was being used, most have what are called APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to access their functionality via software.

A cloud automation engineer would look at all of these pieces and come up with a design, then implement the right processes, software, tools, etc. so that a simple click on the catalog for "End of Quarter Business Tools" would cause all of the other pieces to be provisioned.

There is a lot more involved but hopefully that gives you a sense of what someone in this role has to think about.

(Note: the items in blue are possible topics for future posts)

--Bob

#IWork4Dell

Application Programming Interfaces

In several previous posts I mentioned application programming interfaces (APIs) and that we would cover them in a future post so lets do it now.

APIs are software access points for getting to the functionality of a product, service, tool, technology, etc. Each API has a defined interface and format that must be followed if the API interaction is going to proceed. These APIs are usually published by the entities that own the product, service, etc.

Lets consider an example. Assume your company just bought a storage product and your IT admins are playing with it to get familiar. The product has a nice user interface (UI) which is a good way to learn and explore many features. The product has many customizable capabilities including being able to create storage volumes, back them up different ways, encrypt and/or compress the data, incorporate high-availability, replicate to remote sites, etc.

Once the IT department announces the storage is ready, requests start trickling in for access to it. At first, the IT staff can handle each request through the UI but, with so many features, the team if finding that some of the IT admins are setting things up differently and that is causing some inconsistency. As the requests start to grow rapidly, the admins realize they are doing many of the same things over and over again and it is taking too much time.

They decide to look at the APIs that are available for the storage system and realize, with some effort, they can create scripts or tools. As you would expect, some way of authenticating the API requests is needed to make ensure no one can accesses information they shouldn't be able to. The APIs can be used to provision software, schedule backups, and set a variety of other options mentioned earlier.

Eventually the admins would like to allow employees to make requests through a service catalog. Instead of the requests just coming via email to the admin team, everything would be automated (ie. software driven using the APIs) so very little or no interaction is needed by the admins.

We already touched-on a few of the benefits of APIs. The first is consistency, another one is the ability to automate. Using the APIs also allows for consistent polices, such as security, governance and others,  to be applied. There are certainly other benefits too.

There are different types of APIs and plenty related the cloud but we will save those for other posts. Until then, I suggest you do a google search for APIs, maybe start with ones for your phone type, then look at ones for products and technologies that your company or school uses, then explore the ones published by the public cloud providers.  You will be surprised!

--Bob

#IWork4Dell

It's great to see that Dell Education Services offers a free course on this topic - I'll definitely check it out. I'm curious to know, are there any other examples of companies or organizations that you know of that have successfully transformed their IT departments and reaped the benefits? Also, I'm assuming that the course covers the importance of IT security during the transformation process.  BTW, can you share more about that aspect? And thanks for providing the link to the course.

The Dell Technologies Digital Transformation Index is very insightful; you can find details here:  https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/perspectives/digital-transformation-index.htm  (Check out the video and select the "Read the Executive Summary" button).

There are well-established research firms that provide insight and guidance for a variety of technical topics including digital transformation.  Two that I often look at are Gartner and Forrester.  Some information is accessible for free on their websites but other information is only available to their clients.  I suggest you check with your organization or university to see what research companies they have access to.

--Bob

#IWork4Dell

The next role that I want to highlight is a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).

This is another emerging role and one you may not have heard of yet.  It requires a mix of software expertise and knowledge of automation. SREs often have a background in both software and operations. Platform reliability engineer is another term sometimes used but SRE is more common in the industry.

Their major responsibilities include:

• Create automated solutions for various operational functions like:
  • Capacity planning
  • On-call monitoring
  • Performance monitoring
  • Disaster response
• Monitor operations as well as develop software that will improve system
• Performance and reliability.
• Replace operations done manually with automation.
  • For example, create self-service tools for the team, such as: Automatic test environment provisioning, auto recording of logs, automatic creation of statistical visualizations and so on.
• Monitor the accuracy of the organizations pricing model

--Bob

#IWork4Dell

In my podcast, I mentioned that technology is only one piece of the cloud.

There is a framework or model that has been around for a long time called "People, Process, and Technology", and you may have heard of it before. It can be applied to many things, including cloud computing.

For the "People" piece, some of my previous posts highlighted new cloud-related roles (and I still have a few more to post). Hopefully these roles have given you some insight into the types of skills needed and the job responsibilities.

For an organization to undergo a digital transformation and to utilize cloud computing to help them get there, a complete change in mindset and a change in the way things are currently done, is often needed. In our training, we usually refer to this as a "workforce or cultural transformation". There are many sub-topics for this that we will be able to explore.

For technical people, is it easy to get caught up in the "shiny" or "cool" new technologies but it is essential for customers to be able to understand how this 'new' thing can benefit them. Cloud computing can have tremendous value and it continues to grow as more and more organizations see how the cloud can help them achieve positive business outcomes.

I will continue to add posts related to all three areas: People, Process, and Technology", but I wanted to provide a visual and some context because they are all tied together.

--Bob

#IWork4Dell

We often hear the term governance but what does it mean?

Here are some descriptions from our courses:

• Governance is the way rules, regulations and ethics are created, structured, and sustained.
• Organizations utilize governance to enable them to handle the compliance issues related with IT resources, data usage and network access.
• Governance makes the organization, and the people who are associated with it,
  accountable for any security breach or misuse of resources

At a high level, you can consider enterprise governance to be a process that regulates decision making to ensure that the right people are considering the right things to govern. For most organizations, these processes and policies come from top level executives, including from finance, HR, IT and business units.

Governance is an ongoing thing so enterprise-level assessments will be done to determine what processes are in place, how they are tracked, how well they are working, and so on. These assessments help to identify gaps so that changes can be made.

As you would imagine, some industries require specific requirements related to regulatory compliance, auditing, health care information, country and local government rules, etc.

When an enterprise decides to move towards a hybrid or multi-cloud model, governance planning is essential but will save those details for future posts !

-Bob

#IWork4Dell

The next role that I want to highlight is a DevOps Engineer.

I'm sure many of you have at least heard the term the last few years and some of you might even do some DevOps related work.

DevOps methodologies can really help when building things (I.E. cloud services) by reducing the time between development, implementation, and into production.

Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer often involve:

• Cloud deployment and management
• CI/CD Management (CI = Continuous Integration and CD = Continuous Delivery)
• Performance assessment and monitoring
• Infrastructure management

The topics of DevOps and even CI/CD are great opportunities for future posts.

-Bob
#IWork4Dell

The next role that I want to highlight is a cloud specialist or consultant.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, the responsibilities for each role may be a little different depending on the organization.  The 10+ roles that I previously described may overlap or be combined in smaller organizations, but larger organizations tend to have more of the roles we.   

A cloud specialist is a good example of this.  If you view each of the responsibilities listed below, they could easily fit into some of the previous job roles, and in some organizations they do.      

Responsibilities may include:

• Provide complete guidance or handholding and support to an organization regarding cloud migration and the various cloud computing services.
• Conduct a survey and perform some research to understand where an organization stands with respect to a cloud implementation, what the requirements are and their level of understanding is at that point.
• Analyze the collected data to determine which cloud solutions would best meet their needs.
• Provide recommendations to the organization’s leaders about implementing the chosen cloud technologies.
• Design migration policies and guidelines to help the cloud team in implementing these policies.
• Provide support to help the cloud team implement and maintain the various cloud systems and processes.
• Coordinate with cloud providers and suggest improvements to make the cloud infrastructure and applications better.

--Bob

#IWork4Dell