Does cloud deserve its own MOS?

Organizations across the Defense Department are preparing their IT staff to move to the cloud as part of the agency's plan to use big data analytics.

"It's a struggle, I'll be honest," Mario Roberts, Army cybersecurity chief for the Office Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence (G2), told FCW. Roberts cited a skills gap and stubborn culture as some of the major challenges with the cloud migration.

Cloud migration skills are "new, so we don't have the folks with the right mentality, the right skillsets to do it," Roberts said following a panel on technologies and policies for securing hybrid clouds at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology's winter summit on Jan. 29.

To compensate, he said he's been sending IT staff for training and certifications so they can understand how platforms and applications, like Microsoft Azure, work differently in the cloud environment.

"The Army doesn't have an [military occupational speciality] for cloud. The Air Force doesn't have skillset for cloud. You're an IT guy and you do router switches, there's no cloud guy," Roberts said.

In addition to training, Roberts said the cultural change or "mind shift" has been a challenge in the migration.

"It's a mind shift ,and folks can't quite yet get around that. They want to go back and see blinking lights,  and our blinking lights aren't back there, they're 5,000 miles away in a different facility," he said.

For 2018, Roberts said he hopes to shrink the Army's data center footprint by moving some administrative applications, including those for human resources and identity management, to the cloud.

The goal, he said, is to "figure out what we have, what we need to divest and what we can move to the cloud."

"For the folks who manage [the cloud migration], the engineers, it's hard. For folks who are managers and executives, they want it done like now," said Roberts, who anticipated the roles would be reversed.

But it's not that simple, he said, and there's more to cloud migration than promised cost-savings and increased capabilities.

"Going to the cloud is not as easy as your iPod at your house. It's a lot closer to the backend of that," he said jokingly. "I have to go back and rewrite some code and rewrite some applications to make it work in the cloud."