Cloud Operations Director
Responsible for Sage’s domestic online product portfolio, delivering resilient services and achieving Customer and Colleague success through innovation and leadership
Following a successful team transformation project, we rebranded as Cloud Operations. My position is now responsible for all online products and services that are sold within a specific country/region which equates to 95 services and 26 team members. I focus on the following areas:
People: I lead a team of DevOps specialists who are dedicated to providing the best customer experience possible through innovation and continuous improvement. We support their aspirations by investing in their development, which in turn, provides myriad benefits to Sage and our customers.
Partnerships: I am responsible for the key partnerships such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and LinkByNet (France). I lead the contract negotiations to provide the best possible value for Sage and I’m fortunate to enjoy outstanding working relationships with each partner.
Technology: My team collaboratively builds the solution design for our online products. Using the best available technologies (Infrastructure as Code and Continuous Deployment pipelines), we implement highly resilient, secure and efficient services. Once live, we monitor the service 24x7 through automation and drive continuous improvement.
Processes: I run Change Management and Incident Management processes for all services. I have a strong interest in streamlining and automating these processes as we take full advantage of Continuous Deployment approaches and self-healing services.
Strategy: I, like everyone at Sage, have a personal responsibility to deliver the Vision. I sit on the strategic boards for the products and in-country leadership teams to influence the direction of the services.
Finance: I am responsible for preparing and managing the Cloud Operations budget. Individual hosting contracts can range between £6m and £20m pa. and require sophisticated analysis and cost optimisation.
Compliance: Part of my role is working with our internal and external auditors on a programme of audits. Adhering to our policies is key to minimising the operational risk. We have achieved ISO27001 accreditation on key services in addition to GDPR compliance on all services.
On-boarding: Sage has grown through acquisition and maintained a decentralised model until relatively recently. This has included a large number of services that are run by domestic IT teams with little or no process embedded. My accountability is the migration of these services into my global team, assessing them for quality, migration of personnel, and embedding our processes. The goal is to provide the best possible experience for our customers.