Note: It’s been a while since I blogged actively, and I’m attempting to return to writing short-form posts on a regular basis.

In my current role within Gartner for Technical Professionals, I talk to a lot of cloud architects, engineers, and other technical individual contributors who are concerned that seeking outside assistance for cloud implementations will lead to long-term outsourcing, lack of self-sufficiency, lack of internal cloud skills, and loss of control. (The CIOs I talk to may have similar concerns, although typically more related to CIO-level concerns about outsourcing.)

Those concerns are real, but getting expert outside assistance — from a cloud managed service provider (MSP), consultancy / professional services provider / systems integrator, or even an individual contractor — doesn’t have to mean a sliding down a slippery slope into cloud helplessness.

Things I’ve learned over the past 5+ years of client conversations:

• Use of expert external assistance accelerates and improves cloud adoption. Organizations can strongly benefit from expert assistance. Such assistance reduces implementation times, raises implementation quality, lowers implementation costs as well as long-term total cost of ownership, and provides a better foundation for the organization to enhance its cloud usage in the future.

• Low-quality external assistance can have a devastating impact on cloud outcomes. Choosing the wrong vendor can be highly damaging, resulting in wasted resources, and failure to achieve either the expected business or technical outcomes.

• There must be a skills transition plan in place. Unless the organization expects to outsource cloud operations or application development over the long term, the MSP or consultancy must be contractually obligated to transfer knowledge and skills to the organization’s internal employees. This transfer must occur gradually, over a multi-month or even multi-year period. It is insufficient to do a “handoff” at the end of the contract. The organization needs to shift into a new mode of working as well as gain cloud competence, and this is best done collaboratively, with the external experts handing over responsibilities on a gradual basis.

• The organization needs to retain responsibility for cloud strategy and governance. It is dangerous for organizations to hand over strategic planning to an external vendor, as it is unlikely that plans produced by an external party will be optimally aligned to the organization’s business needs. For similar reasons, the organization also needs to retain responsibility for governance, including the creation of policy. An external party may be able to provide useful advice and implementation assistance, but should not be allowed to make strategy or policy decisions

You can cut years off your migration efforts, and significantly accelerate getting your foundations laid (building a Cloud Center of Excellence, etc.) by getting the right entity to do at least some of it with you, rather than doing all of it for you.