4 Cloud Competencies Essential to Enterprise Migration

Is your company in the process of moving to a higher level of cloud maturity? If this is the case, you should be aware of the four levels of cloud competency—awareness, proficiency, leverage, and collaboration—which will assist you in making the most of the cloud.

Of course, you’ll need the support of your entire team, which can be one of the most challenging aspects of the journey to navigate. It is simply insufficient to adopt tools and instruct your teams to begin using them. However, cultivating these four cloud competencies will assist your team in identifying new product opportunities and developing innovative solutions, thereby increasing your ROI. In this post, we’ll discuss the four essential cloud competencies, why they’re important, and share insights to help you develop them in your teams.

Awareness of Cloud Tools and Services

You can’t get anywhere until you know where you’re heading, like with any voyage. You might presume that everyone knows the cloud tools and services accessible in their respective fields. While this may be true for technical groups such as IT and development, it is unlikely to be true for non-technical sectors such as finance and HR.

In any case, team members unaware of cloud products and services and how they might aid optimize operations may be hindered from completing their responsibilities efficiently and effectively. You must, of course, bring leadership up to speed as well.

For example, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are a hot topic right now, with a slew of technologies available to help with procedures in nearly every industry. Knowing which cloud tools are relevant to your goals will guarantee that the cloud transformation benefits your entire firm.

Cloud Proficiency

There are many reasons why companies move to the cloud, but they all center on ROI, or return on investment, which is a metric that assesses how effectively your company is functioning to service customers or achieve other business objectives like cost reduction. However, you’ll only get a return on investment in these areas if your team understands how to access and use cloud services properly. It’s also crucial to remember that improper use of these services might inadvertently expose unencrypted confidential data—or even passwords and encryption keys—in public repositories, posing significant security hazards.

When your employees are adept in using cloud tools and services securely, effectively, and affordably, you’ll start experiencing real business benefits. As a result, getting your teams up to speed as soon as feasible is critical.

Ability to Leverage Cloud Tools and Services

As previously stated, you’ll only begin to see a return on investment after your workers become proficient with cloud tools. On the other hand, Fluency permits team members to continue their responsibilities. They’ll solve business problems using cloud tools in creative and productive ways if they have a higher cloud competency level.

For example, thanks to flexible resource allocation, zero-downtime SLAs, faster access to the information they need, and more, your team may use cloud tools to provide better customer service, including taking advantage of cloud storage.

But keep in mind that these advantages do not appear anywhere. Before they can start applying their knowledge creatively to grow your organization, your team members must first master the first two competencies: awareness and proficiency.

Skill in Cloud Collaboration

Different teams frequently operate in parallel, duplicating each other’s efforts, squandering time, money, and energy, and possibly introducing errors. The issue isn’t with the cloud tools or services; it’s with the lack of collaboration. Collaboration pulls together several parts of your company, including IT, HR, development, operations, production, and fulfillment—the possibilities are endless. Rather than focusing on individual objectives, different groups might collaborate to achieve shared strategic goals, such as industry-leading innovation or improved user experience. (Don’t worry; teamwork benefits individual departments as well!)

Your teams will find areas of overlap with this expertise, allowing them to implement efficiencies. This is commonly referred to as “breaking down silos,” but it may also be viewed as bringing together the most acceptable practices from various organizations or departments.

The ability to develop collaborative skills is determined by company culture; groups or departments should never feel compelled to compete for scarce resources. Instead, they should recognize that they are working together to improve the organization and deliver better service in general. This message must come from high for all teams to get on board.

All In It Together

Not every employee needs competency training in every area. Managers and technical teams, for example, will need to be more knowledgeable about a broader range of products and services than employees who are only utilizing them. Regardless of rank or responsibility, however, every employee must learn the tools and abilities necessary for their job. And, ideally, they’ll be able to function more efficiently as a result of fundamental cloud transformation.

Employees at all levels must be aware of the impact of cloud security risks on their job. Understanding how cloud tools will make their jobs easier, safer, and more efficient will help them get on board. However, due to the profound changes that occur with cloud transformation, getting buy-in from team members is typically tricky.