Staff need to be considered in cloud deployments

Cloud service providers have been warned not to underestimate the importance of getting customer staff ready for a hosted environment.

Although cloud adoption is increasing there are still issues for resellers to consider points out Martin O'Donnell, cloud and hosting services director at Phoenix.

He said that recent figures from the Cloud Industry Forum indicating many customers were either rolling out cloud now or planning to in the next year were encouraging but did have a caveat.

"The research from CIF makes for favourable reading and even those firms who have initially expressed concerns about migration will likely sit up and take notice of the latest adoption and growth trends. However, in spite of this it's important to realise that cloud adoption does have its teething issues," he said.

One of the main issues can be around the way that staff interact with the cloud.

"Education of staff is essential - the move to a cloud platform will mean a fundamental change to how services are deployed and as a result the flexible benefits of this on-demand cloud technology comes with responsibility which needs to be appropriately cascaded to all teams involved," he added.

"Existing processes will need to be shored up and new processes developed to support a new way of working with IT resources," he added.