What Does Cloud Mean for the VP of Operations?

Operations is a well-defined discipline with many years of experience manifested by organization, processes, and tools. As applications and workload move to the cloud, the established service management and operations processes must be revisited. The goal must be to reach a balance among service reliability, higher velocity, and productivity to respond more quickly to market opportunities and threats. If you don’t reach a balance between both positions, the result will be conflict among departments, often paired with distrust.

The issue is that traditional IT service management (ITSM) processes are perceived as being cumbersome, complex, and in conflict with practices such as Agile and DevOps. This perception results in solutions being built and used inside organizations without explicit approval — a situation sometimes called Shadow IT. Unfortunately, Shadow IT can lead to compliance issues, inefficiencies, and organizational...