The Cloud Expert
The Cloud Expert uses self-managed third-party servers — the Cloud — to offload a lot of common tasks, and liability, to the Cloud provider. The third-pary offers services like computing, databases, scheduled execution, domain name resolution, queues, backups in an abstracted and pre-packaged way that is easier to manage.
Legally, and from PR purposes, the cloud offers protection — for a company as a whole, and for the individual employee. An Outage of a whole region often takes down very big sites. If your small SAAS offering fails too, you can point at the Cloud provider. The counterpart to this expanding array of offerings, and the outsourced liability, is the data fees, which can make the solution much less attractive financially, and lock-up customers with the provider.
The Cloud abstracts away the hardware and infrastructure, to focus on the core problem of the business.
Skills
The cost
For some customers the cloud can be cost-saving. For others, it can be multiple times the previous cost. Especially once you consider the cost of hiring cloud engineers/experts in AWS or GCP. Misconfigured cloud services can cost a company a lot of company, and even bankrupt it. The Cloud Expert keeps an eye on cost, and sets limits and alerts correctly, to avoid these critical errors.
A multitude of offerings
Cloud providers like Amazon — with AWS — release new services often. Keeping track of which services are recommended, and for which uses, is not trivial. There might be differences in documentation, limits that become only apparent once you are deeply invested into the path of that particular service. Somebody that has navigated this before can foresee common problems down the road and advise against them.
Locking in via the data
Ingress and egress costs in the cloud are the little detail that can bite you once you are deeply invested. The costs of data entering or leaving the cloud can be quite high. Once you use a lot of services from a cloud provider, leaving the system might become prohibitively expensive (because of data transfer prices). In this case, an institution might prefer to kick the can down the road by remaining with the provider for one more month.
Security
On one side, the competency fo the cloud provider is probably higher that the average copany, in terms of backups, security measures, etc. On the other side, when credentials are misconfigured, the consequences can be much higher that with a more limited offering. Since cloud providers are scalable — can provide more resources as you need them, while increasing your bill — compromises credentials can cost a lot. Improperly protected credentials could make you wake up to a tens of thousands bills after somebody uses your account to mine cryptocurrencies — a very cpu/gpu intensive task — for instance. While cloud providers like AWS are often willing to return the money after these mistakes, there is no guarantee they will.
A new set of problems
With new tools old problems become easier — or disappear — and new problems appear. Developers might not be used to work with the new tools, services might not document corner cases appropriately — or might document different services with different levels of detail. Without any constraint and all the available "toys" to play with, the level of complexity can explode. A Cloud Expert, knows when to restrain which services to use, and keeps, and documents, a picture of the whole system.