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Cloud Ops: The New IT for the Cloud Era

Over the past few months of interviewing and researching dozens of companies—particularly small to mid-sized SaaS businesses—one pattern keeps emerging: the desire to stand up a Cloud Operations (Cloud Ops) organization.

It makes sense on the surface. Cloud is now the infrastructure of choice, so naturally, someone needs to “own” it. But what’s unfolding in practice often misses the mark.

Many companies are attempting to solve growing cloud complexity by taking all their DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering talent and consolidating them into a Cloud Ops team. The idea? Share them across product teams so no one gets overwhelmed.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same centralization tactic used by traditional IT for decades. And it's creating the same problems.

When Cloud Ops Becomes Old IT in Disguise

Here’s the playbook we’re seeing:

  • Move DevOps, SRE, and Ops into a central Cloud Ops team.

  • Let them handle infrastructure, CI/CD, monitoring, and cloud security across all teams.

  • Expect engineering teams to "consume" cloud through tickets or requests.

While the intention is to reduce duplication and increase efficiency, the result is often the opposite: bottlenecks, lack of ownership, slow velocity, and frustrated developers.

Sound familiar?

What Good Cloud Ops Looks Like

A healthy Cloud Ops organization shouldn't be a service desk or a ticket resolver. It should be a strategic enabler.

Here’s what good looks like:

🔍 Acts as a Governing Body, Not a Bottleneck

Cloud Ops should define the guardrails—not build the road every time. It sets standards and policies, not pipelines for individual teams.

🧭 Leads the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)

A strong Cloud Ops team leads the organization's CCoE, guiding cloud strategy, governance, and enablement.

💰 Owns FinOps Practices

They should drive cost optimization, cloud budgeting, and cost visibility across teams. Cloud costs are everyone's responsibility, but Cloud Ops makes it actionable.

🏗️ Defines Cloud Architecture

From choosing the right building blocks to ensuring best practices for resilience and scalability, Cloud Ops leads architectural decisions without owning all the implementation.

🔐 Drives Security Best Practices

Cloud Ops builds and enforces cloud security policies, IAM standards, and compliance guidelines in collaboration with security teams.

🛠️ Maintains Cloud Policies & Service Catalogs

They manage reusable infrastructure components and approved services, empowering teams to move fast within well-defined boundaries.

🚀 Enables Platform Engineering

Cloud Ops can operate as a platform team, building developer portals, paved paths, and internal tooling that make the cloud easier and safer to consume.

📚 Educates & Consults

Most importantly, Cloud Ops should be a force multiplier—consulting with engineering teams, running enablement sessions, and building documentation—not inserting itself into every delivery pipeline.

What Cloud Ops Should Not Be Doing

Let’s be clear on what Cloud Ops is not:

  • ❌ Building product-specific CI/CD pipelines

  • ❌ Owning application monitoring dashboards

  • ❌ Managing infrastructure per product team

  • ❌ Sitting in the critical path of every engineering workflow

That’s not scalable. That’s old-school IT.

Final Thoughts

Cloud Ops isn’t about rebranding your IT department or centralizing DevOps into a one-size-fits-all model. Done right, it’s a strategic capability that empowers engineering teams to innovate faster—with guardrails, not gates.

If you’re building a Cloud Ops function, make sure it's designed for enablement—not control.

Because in the cloud era, velocity is the new uptime.


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