Skills Gap Analysis

The roles and skills required for a successful cloud transformation are of particular interest to enterprises beginning their journey to a cloud-based transformation. As mentioned in Figure 5.2, the cloud roles and competences needed to set up a cloud center of excellence can be obtained from roles and competences typically present within an enterprise, through adaptation mechanisms, such as reskilling and upskilling plans, or through workforce onboarding plans.

At this purpose, a skill gap analysis can enable the enterprise to identify and match the skills needed to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence and reach a successful cloud-based transformation.

In order to conduct a skills gap analysis, the cloud roles with the related necessary competences, and how the latter differ from the skills potentially present within an organization have been illustrated.

Architecture

The Cloud Enterprise Architect works together to define business goals and creates the business infrastructure that supports those goals. Job responsibilities may involve assisting in the creation and execution of the information technology architecture roadmap. The Enterprise Architect must ensure that the right business infrastructure is created and that new applications meet all business standards.

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Traditionally, an enterprise architect has competences in designing traditional architecture, such as multi-tier.

In cloud environments, a cloud enterprise architect must comprehend cloud architecture design, workflows, integrations and inter-service communications, native cloud application and managed services with their related integrations.

Infrastructure

The Cloud Infrastructure Engineers design and develop systems and networks in cloud environments. They develop cloud networks that store data remotely and on systems related to connecting clients to the cloud. Since they work with systems that access and store data online, they are also involved in making decisions regarding data storage and security.

In more legacy and traditional environments, competences regarding how to design and manage an IT infrastructure are held be several specialists that can be defined as compute engineers, storage engineers, network engineers, middleware engineers and app platform engineers.

In cloud environments, a team of cloud infrastructure engineers must combine the previously defined competences. Moreover, a cloud infrastructure engineer must develop knowledge regarding cloud managed services and related integrations, cloud basics, cloud network management, cloud storage management including how to define a backup strategy.

Operations

The Cloud Operations Engineers are in charge of supporting cloud-based software applications.

They manage the resolution of system change requests, use infrastructure monitoring tools to respond to alerts and continually improve system stability. The DevOps approach, generally adopted, simplifies daily activities through the automation of operations.

Traditionally, specialists who are responsible for the IT infrastructure operation have networking backgrounds and knowledge regarding operating systems and cyber security.

In cloud environment, they must broaden their skills by embracing knowledge regarding:

• Cloud Basics

• Operations of IaaS solutions such as Virtual Machine recovery

• Managed service operations including knowledge in database as a service, native load balancing, autoscaling

• Native managed services dashboards such as metrics and alert

• Monitoring PaaS solutions

• Cloud storage management and operations such as resize volume, restore storage objects

• Disaster Recovery management Security

The Cloud Security Engineers are responsible for identifying cloud platform security requirements and complying with risk management control objectives. They provide standardized solutions to facilitate continuous security and compliance within application stacks and the cloud environment. Finally, they integrate security standards and oversee products and offers.

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Traditionally, IT security engineers are present within the organization, and they have competences in cyber security, identity and access management and active directory management.

In cloud environment, they must acquire knowledge regarding principles of cloud architecture, cloud security design, integration and functionality of managed services.

Application

The Cloud Solution Architect is responsible for global cloud technical architecture. He collaborates with the Product Manager to translate customer requirements into technical results.

Furthermore, he is responsible for the technical deliver and establishing the technical direction.

Traditionally, a solution architect has competences in scripting and in designing traditional IT architecture such as multi tiers. Moreover, he has knowledge of operating systems, networking and cyber security.

In cloud environments, a cloud solution architect owns skills and knowledge regarding:

• Cloud architecture design including autoscaling and automatic recovery

• Native cloud application

• Managed services and related integrations such as PaaS solutions

• Cloud base design including account definition strategy, virtual network design and security principles

• Cloud governance such as Access Control Lists and Identity and Access Management

• Cloud monitoring implementations

• Cost control and optimization

• Cloud adoption approach and plan

As far as the applications are concerned, the Cloud Software Engineers are responsible for coding and development of applications with knowledge of best practices of the cloud architecture. They are also involved in deploying and debugging cloud-based applications.

Traditionally, software engineers own knowledge of operating systems and capabilities in designing software.

In cloud environments, they must acquire competencies and knowledge in cloud native applications, in particular in scaling applications leveraging cloud resources and integrating managed services such as PaaS solutions for objects storage.

Data

The Data Platform Engineer provides continuous support for any coding needs for data processing and system interfaces. It must understand how machine learning will change data acquisition, system requirements and performance, as well as the customer experience for the systems, services and applications they support.

This profile develops the data architecture to acquire and process data and works directly with the data scientist to create documented goals, capabilities, time horizons, outputs, and other data-centric activities.

Traditionally, data platform engineers own competences in designing data pipeline and storing data.

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In cloud environments, cloud data platform engineers must acquire skills and competences in:

designing cloud architecture, native cloud applications, cloud data platforms and storing data in cloud.

Completely new roles, that cannot be sourced from existing IT roles, are also necessary. The most important ones are:

Cloud DevOps and Automation Engineers responsible for deployment of artifacts and stacks infrastructure as well as applications and their operations through the use of pipeline and CI/CD platform, configuration management platform, artifact/code repository and many other automation tools.

They have skills and competences regarding: cloud basics, managed services and related integrations with preexisting environments, infrastructure provisioning automations tools (Infrastructure as Code) and CI/CD approach.

Cloud Governance e Cost Control role oversees process in cloud such as cloud computing policy definition, cloud provider selection and relationships, cloud solution architecture designing, workload placement, and governance. It provides both guidelines and constraints that improve outcomes and manage risks. This profile defines and disseminates best practices within the organization.

This role is characterized by skills and knowledge regarding cloud basis, cloud architecture and cloud managed services.