The Wizards in the Cloud

This post is a follow-up to Kevin Liu’s previous post, “The People in the Cloud.” Kevin is a partner manager and cloud deployment specialist at Avalon Solutions, and was originally published on Medium.

There was once a time when it made sense for every company to keep IT infrastructure on-premise. There was also once a time when it made sense to keep a copy of the Yellow Pages next to your rotary phone.

Thankfully, times change.

The fear of change is real. Today, the IT professional who advocates for on-premise systems is the same IT professional who is hiding cash under their bed. Without confronting their fears, these IT professionals will struggle to become change leaders.

To most employees in a company, the cloud is still an abstract concept. They can’t see it or touch it but they’ve heard of it, kind of like Hogwarts. Unlike Hogwarts however, the cloud is very much accessible to us mere Muggles.

With the ubiquity of cloud technology in the consumer space, the expectations of enterprise software have–and will continue to–change. The very idea of the “traditional” IT professional is being challenged as it becomes easier to outsource or offload certain tasks. IT professionals must fundamentally shift their perspectives if they intend to elevate themselves to a learned position. They must prepare themselves to be enablers–the Hermione to their company’s Harry.

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Knowledge and resources are key to elevating a dedicated IT team to Hermione status. The need to stay ahead of the technology curve is usually innate within IT professionals, but it has to be purposeful for there to be a benefit. The cloud space changes too quickly for anyone to proclaim themselves an expert without continued education.

Education goes beyond reading about the latest gadget or digital trend. Do you understand the macro technology trends within your industry? Do you understand the business problems your company faces? IT can no longer be a siloed department relegated to building basements. Solving business problems with a technical mindset can be less tangible than fixing a local server outage, but the value added brings IT professional and their companies greater returns.

While money is almost always the first thing executives think of when they read “resources,” IT professionals need a different kind of resource; they need tools. In the age of the cloud, great software becomes the backbone of every business process. When IT professionals are given the opportunity to try new software and explore new solutions, their technical repertoire is multiplied. The IT team becomes the company’s matchmakers, solving business problems with the right technology.

Yes, sometimes you will need an IT guru to fix a printer, and there are risks involved with experimenting with new software, but the shift in the IT professional’s role has been a long time coming. It’s time to embrace the change. With erudition and the right tools, the humble IT professional becomes a key player in shaping businesses’ futures.

When in doubt, ask yourself: what would Hermione do?

Kevin Liu (@KevKevLiu) is a Partner Manager and Cloud Deployment Specialist at Avalon Solutions. Born in São Paulo, raised in Beijing, educated in Boston, and now a Stockholm resident, he is a devoted foodie and movie binger.