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The idea that IT leaders and their teams should pay attention to broader issues outside of their direct remit has been on the agenda of many businesses for years.  IT should play a much greater role, it has been argued, than its traditional speciality of ‘keeping the technology lights on’.  But for many, the scope to achieve greater levels of integration has been limited, not least by the need to control IT investment and drive down costs.

Now, the rapid adoption of cloud is driving a change in how organisations see IT supporting their business as a whole.  A year ago, this meant the emergence of ‘cloud people’, where organisations were increasingly shaping their IT teams with cloud front of mind.  At the time, that was an emerging concept, yet just a year later we are seeing the growth of a broader ‘cloud culture’, whose influence is going far beyond tech teams and right into the boardroom.

‘Cloud people’ are here

Cloud, in its many forms (public, private, hybrid, hyper-scale…), has been a massive success story.  As undoubtedly one of the most discussed tech trends in recent years, people could be forgiven for thinking that it’s already established a winning position in the technology industry.

Yet, according to tech analyst house IDC, cloud spending is some distance away from its likely peak, compared to investment in ‘traditional’ approaches to IT.  Estimates say it will be 2020 before spending on cloud services will come close to equalling what is spent on traditional IT.

But a ‘resource revolution’ is already well underway with organisations using cloud to change how their IT teams work – not at the expense of jobs, but in the pursuit of specialisation.

Recent research from Freeform Dynamics, for example, revealed that reports of cloud-driven shrinkage in IT teams are exaggerated; IT teams are using cloud to develop specialist skills among their staff, rather than reduce headcount. Indeed over the last three years only 6% of research respondents reported some decrease in the size of their IT teams. In contrast, over 70% reported their IT teams had seen ‘some’ increase or a ‘significant’ increase in staff levels.

Over the next three years, while many are expecting a net increase in the size of IT teams overall, the growth rates are slowing (45% indicating growth, with only 7% within this expecting a significant increase).  However, there is a major shift in the make up of IT teams driven by the adoption of cloud and hosting. Looking at the mix of specialists versus generalists, the number of those declaring at least half of their teams being made up of generalists falls off dramatically as the use of cloud goes up.

This confirms that the need for generalist IT staff to take care of routine operations (provisioning, patching, etc), decreases rapidly with cloud adoption. Emphasis is switching to more specialist skills such as architecture, design, security, information management and line-of-business applications.

‘Cloud culture’ is coming

So what’s next? As the bottom-line benefits of cloud are better understood at board level, business leaders are seeing it as way to ensure IT can have a more direct impact on overall success.  ‘Cloud culture’ is changing the way businesses think about the way they operate, not just the way they manage IT.

That idea is supported by the findings of the Freeform Dynamics study, which showed that contrary to the industry marketing hype, only 15% of cloud users were motivated purely by cost savings when adopting the technology.

Instead, 31% said balancing cost management and value was their priority, while 23% were concerned primarily with value. This shows that cloud adoption is being driven by a wide range of objectives, from management of service levels and responsiveness to change, to the management of IT related risks, to simply getting the most from suppliers.

Lessons can be learnt from the startup community, for instance, who enthusiastically embrace cloud solutions to give them flexibility and control as they expand and develop.

Startups are also setting the trend for the type of IT leader and team members needed in today’s economy.  They frequently look for people who can bring an approach that balances business need and technology expertise.  They might not have the deep technical background of their counterparts from the pre-cloud era, but they can very effectively bridge the gap between business need and IT delivery.

An increasing part of the cloud cultural mix is the way businesses also now rely on specialist partners, such as Cloud Service Providers, to make their shift in tech investment pay off.  

CSPs deliver specialist skills, experience and infrastructure to support in-house teams ‘as-a-service’. In the early days of the cloud market, providers often delivered their services in a largely hands-off manner. This may remain appropriate in the context of some requirements, but today, where converged services increasingly make more sense, customers are making a broader commitment to individual providers. In an emerging cloud culture, those providers must become more willing to play an engaged role and get even more involved with the customer’s environment.

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If you asked a group of IT professionals for a list of outcomes driving companies to adopt cloud computing, no one would be surprised if saving costs came out near the top. Similarly, it would be taken as a given that increased use of cloud computing by organisations would lead to a corresponding reduction in their internal IT staff.

Neither of those preconceptions are true.

What is true is that the momentum behind cloud computing is growing and it is becoming an integral part of IT delivery for many businesses. According to a survey of more than 500 IT professionals in organisations with 50 to 2,500 employees, undertaken exclusively for Six Degrees Group (6DG) by Freeform Dynamics, 96% of respondents have some involvement with the cloud. One fifth reported “extensive” use of cloud and 52% described it as “significant”. Just under a quarter (24%) said their involvement with cloud was “modest”.

The research also found that cloud usage was growing, with 56% of respondents reporting a steady increase in cloud adoption levels and 18% describing it as rapid. While those figures are impressive, they do not signal the wholesale rush away from ‘on-premise’ hosting that some observers would have us believe is taking place. Given the relative youth of the market and uncertainty over the service level delivery from providers, it’s perhaps understandable that organisations are actually pacing their adoption of cloud.

It’s not about cost savings or cutting jobs

One thing we can be sure of, however, is that cost savings are not the main motivating factor for businesses seeking to adopt cloud technology. According to the survey, only 15% cited it as their primary factor for implementing cloud solutions. Almost a third (31%) said cost management was important but only when combined with delivering more value to the business, while almost a quarter were concerned mainly with value.

That focus on value is probably connected with another finding that seems to be counter-intuitive to the accepted narrative around cloud computing that moving IT functions ‘off-premise’ should lead to a reduction in internal IT staff. According to the survey, the result of a rise in the adoption of cloud computing for the majority of IT organisations has been the exact opposite. Only 6% reported a decrease in the size of their IT teams over the last three years, while more than 70% said there had been ‘some’ increase or a ‘significant’ rise in staffing levels in the same period.

IT teams can focus on the business

The increase in staffing levels for many (likely to continue over the next three years, although at a slower rate) has been linked to a change in the profile of IT teams, especially as organisations increase their usage of cloud. Businesses making extensive or significant use of cloud tend to have more specialist IT staff than those making modest or no use of cloud. More than half (56%) of organisations reporting modest or no use of cloud have a majority of specialist IT staff in their teams, compared to only 13% of extensive cloud users and 17% of significant cloud adopters.

This suggests that the need for generalist IT staff to take care of routine operations (provisioning, patching, etc), decreases rapidly with cloud adoption. The emphasis switches to more specialist skills such as architecture, design, security, information management and line-of-business applications. In other words, IT departments using cloud more extensively are refocusing internal resources away from routine tasks towards more specialist skills and tasks that enhance business performance.

Service providers will need to do more

As companies use more cloud services and become reliant on cloud service providers, they will expect more of them. Providers that can aggregate multiple services into a single integrated solution will have a key role to play. The more a service provider can deal with integration issues at source, the less the business has to worry about and the more time IT teams can spend on activities that generate value.

This is understandable in a future landscape where a single provider could be delivering a broader converged offering that might include elements of voice and data communications, traditional infrastructure hosting, shared/public cloud resources and even full platform or application related services. Given those circumstances, providers will need to be able to speak with in-house specialists on a peer-to-peer basis within an overall engagement approach based on partnership and enablement.

IT teams won’t die but they will change

But whatever the hype about cloud, the in-house IT team will still be here for many years to come.  Cloud will not magically address all of a company’s technology requirements, so it’s highly unlikely everything will shift off-premise soon, if ever, for most mid-sized businesses. But while internal IT teams will survive, they will also change, so IT departments would be well-advised to have a strategy to evolve their skill mix, the way they function, and how they engage within the business and with suppliers. As cloud services become an ever more prominent part of IT service delivery, significant change within IT teams is inevitable.