Operations in the business refer to the processes and activities responsible for producing and delivering a company’s products or services. Still, the focus of this article will be the specific operations that people in the cloud roles have to perform to deliver services efficiently and effectively and meet customer demands while achieving the organization’s overall objectives.
When that happens in the cloud, it’s called cloud operations. When discussing cloud roles and operations, there are 3 considerations you need to keep in mind.
CONSIDERATION 1: Duties
The duties of the people on the cloud operations team involve minimum business interruptions within an agreed-upon operations budget. Determine workload criticality, the impact of disruptions, or performance degradation. Establish business-approved cost and performance commitments.
Cloud operations team members help solve business problems by using data to provide actionable options to drive decision-making. In this role, they use tools and applications provided by their organization’s developers and IT business decision-makers to find, analyze, and present data.
CONSIDERATION 2: Challenges
Given the exponentially growing volumes of data within most businesses, the high probability of new varieties of data (usually machine-generated, non-relational, and semi-structured at best), and the increased expectations of business stakeholders for:
- Faster turnaround times for data questions, and
- Data answers with a more significant potential impact (e.g., don’t just tell me historical data trends, build me, forecasting models, etc.)
Cloud operations teams often feel overwhelmed when working with massive data assets requiring more complex tools to meet tight deadlines solving highly aggressive business needs. To complicate things, they usually have to jump between tools to solve different parts of their tasks. One tool for finding the data, one mechanism for analyzing the data, and one or multiple tools for presenting the data for decision-making. This switching between devices AND the movement of the data itself between systems presents challenges on the following fronts:
- Time is lost by information workers learning multiple tools and simply moving between devices even when they are efficient.
- Mistakes in the data (human or machine) as it is moved, shaped, filtered, and pivoted between multiple tools and potentially multiple people
- Potential illegal mishandling of data (HIPPA, GDPR, etc.) as every new step in the process represents another opportunity for a breach.
CONSIDERATION 3: Rhythm of Change
Cloud operations team members often can’t keep up with the pace of change. They struggle to learn the tools provided to meet the needs of business stakeholders. Information workers are seeking a solution that allows them to:
- Find data in a single place regardless of volume or variety to ensure quick location and consistent, secure access and reduce the need for data movement.
- Analyze that data using a tool with broad capabilities but a consistent interface and framework (query languages, scripting logic, etc.) to reduce time lost.
- Present data and analyses in simple, well-formatted ways and don’t take time to build and maintain (i.e., don’t require professional graphic designers and constantly need the data to be refreshed).