The IT Department in the Cloud Era – Rise and Shine?

A great amount of companies have outsourced their IT services and infrastructure to the cloud providers in the past few years. And the trend is just at the beginning – many IT teams will have their responsibilities diminished or even eliminated in the following years. Some voices in the industry believe the IT department will have a more strategic role and their work will be a little more meaningful than managing an IT infrastructure.

Indeed, cloud allows companies to focus on producing a better product at a lower cost and not worry about the server maintenance or security. However, the IT departments will not totally disappear and here’s why:

Hardware
You might hear of companies being 100% virtualized although with some companies and all of their legacy internal systems, not everything can be moved to the cloud. So the IT department will need to manage a hybrid environment. There may still be laptops and/or desk computers, printers, smartphones and other mobile devices that need to be configured or optimized and a corporate network that needs to be managed.

Data
Data can be stored in the cloud or locally. Either way, someone for inside the company has to manage it, and today that job is the IT department.

Security
There are activities that will need supervision from an internal IT department such as identity access management. The IT department has to make sure that users authenticate when using SaaS applications or when accessing secure data. It is also the IT’s department responsibility to ensure that the information moving between its data center and the local devices is encrypted and safe.

Monitoring Cloud Subscriptions
The IT team has the background to track cloud service subscriptions and make sure the costs stay within budget.

In the end, the IT department in some way will still exist. What’s your opinion? How will the IT department rise and shine within the cloud computing?

Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1144732