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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Systems Analyst

💰 $ - $

CloudITSystems EngineeringDevOpsSecurity

🎯 Role Definition

A Cloud Systems Analyst is responsible for designing, implementing, operating, and optimizing cloud infrastructure and platform services to ensure secure, resilient, and cost-effective delivery of applications and services. This role partners with engineering, security, product, and operations teams to translate business requirements into cloud architecture, automate provisioning, enforce governance, manage incidents, and continuously improve cloud performance and cost-efficiency.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Administrator with cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP).
  • Cloud Engineer / Cloud Operations Engineer.
  • DevOps Engineer or Infrastructure Engineer with IaC experience.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Systems Analyst / Cloud Architect.
  • Cloud Engineering Lead or Platform Engineer Manager.
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead or Head of Cloud Operations.

Lateral Moves:

  • Security Engineer (Cloud Security Specialist)
  • Platform Engineer / DevOps Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, document, and implement cloud infrastructure architectures (IaaS, PaaS, serverless) that satisfy availability, scalability, and security requirements while aligning to organizational standards.
  • Develop and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates and modules using Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, or Pulumi to ensure repeatable, version-controlled provisioning.
  • Automate deployment pipelines and release processes using CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) to accelerate delivery and reduce manual configuration drift.
  • Configure and operate container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, EKS, AKS, GKE) including cluster provisioning, autoscaling, upgrades, and detailed runbooks for platform reliability.
  • Monitor cloud performance and health using APM and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, CloudWatch) and implement alerts, dashboards, and SLO/SLI tracking.
  • Lead cloud migration projects by assessing on‑premises workloads, defining migration strategies (rehost, refactor, replatform), building migration runbooks, and executing lift-and-shift and cloud-native transformations.
  • Harden cloud environments by implementing IAM best practices, least privilege policies, network segmentation (VPCs, VNets), security groups, and encryption for data at rest and in transit.
  • Collaborate with security and compliance teams to implement controls, remediate vulnerabilities, and ensure cloud environments meet frameworks such as SOC2, ISO27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or internal policies.
  • Optimize cloud cost and resource utilization through rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, tagging governance, and cost monitoring reports with actionable recommendations for leadership.
  • Develop and maintain backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans for cloud workloads, conduct RTO/RPO analysis, and perform periodic failover and restore testing.
  • Troubleshoot complex production incidents, perform root cause analysis (RCA), coordinate incident response, and drive post‑incident remediation and process changes.
  • Implement networking and connectivity designs including VPN, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, peering, load balancers, and hybrid connectivity patterns to support secure and performant applications.
  • Evaluate and onboard new cloud services and third-party integrations that improve developer productivity, security posture, or operational efficiency; create cost/benefit analyses.
  • Establish and enforce cloud governance practices, tagging strategies, and organizational policies through policy-as-code tools (AWS Organizations, Azure Policy, GCP Organization policies).
  • Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, process diagrams, architecture decision records, and playbooks for platform operations and incident handling.
  • Mentor and onboard junior engineers, conduct knowledge-sharing sessions, and help establish runbook and standards adoption across engineering teams.
  • Perform capacity planning and performance tuning of cloud services and databases, and recommend architectural changes to meet future scale and latency objectives.
  • Implement logging and centralized log aggregation (ELK/EFK, Cloud Logging) to provide traceability, security auditing, and operational insights across distributed services.
  • Integrate identity and access management with enterprise SSO, MFA, role-based access controls, and service accounts to reduce risk and enable secure automation.
  • Participate in cross-functional architecture reviews, design sprints, and Agile ceremonies to align cloud designs with product priorities and delivery timelines.
  • Lead evaluations of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies, including trade-off analysis for vendor lock-in, resilience, and cost implications.
  • Maintain compliance with patching schedules, configuration baselines, and vulnerability scanning for cloud resources and container images.
  • Implement service discovery, secret management, and configuration management solutions (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, Consul) for secure operations.
  • Drive a culture of automation and continuous improvement by identifying manual tasks for automation and developing reusable platform capabilities and self-service tools.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Provide estimates and technical input for project planning, including migration timelines and effort breakdowns.
  • Act as a liaison between application teams and cloud platform teams to ensure successful deployments and rollbacks.
  • Conduct periodic architecture and security reviews of third-party SaaS integrations and marketplace offerings.
  • Support procurement and vendor evaluation for cloud-related tools, services, and professional services engagements.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficiency with at least one major public cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including compute, storage, networking, and managed services.
  • Strong experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, Pulumi) and Git-based workflows.
  • Expertise in containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/AKS/GKE) and related tooling for CI/CD deployment.
  • Solid scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, PowerShell, or Go for operational automation and tooling.
  • Familiarity with observability stacks and monitoring solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, New Relic) and alerting strategy.
  • Practical knowledge of cloud security controls, IAM design, encryption, key management, and vulnerability remediation.
  • Networking fundamentals including VPC/VNet architecture, subnetting, routing, NAT, load balancing, DNS, and hybrid connectivity patterns.
  • Experience with configuration management and secret management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager).
  • Understanding of CI/CD systems and pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) and automated testing for infrastructure.
  • Cost management and cloud financial governance skills including tagging, cost allocation, rightsizing, and reporting.
  • Experience with database management in cloud environments (RDS/Cloud SQL, DynamoDB, Cosmos DB) and performance tuning.
  • Knowledge of compliance frameworks and cloud controls (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA) and audit readiness.
  • Familiarity with disaster recovery planning, RTO/RPO definitions, and backup strategies for cloud-native and stateful services.
  • Experience with log aggregation, centralized logging, and SIEM tools for detection and analysis (ELK, Splunk, Cloud Logging).

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for cross-functional stakeholder collaboration and documentation.
  • Analytical problem-solving mindset with the ability to perform root cause analysis and derive long-term fixes.
  • Customer-service orientation and ability to prioritize operational requests under pressure during incidents.
  • Collaborative team player who can coach others, facilitate design discussions, and drive consensus.
  • Project management aptitude with experience estimating effort, managing deliverables, and tracking dependencies.
  • Adaptability and continuous-learning mindset to keep pace with evolving cloud services and best practices.
  • Attention to detail with a focus on secure, repeatable, and auditable infrastructure changes.
  • Strategic thinking to balance immediate operational needs with long-term cloud architecture decisions.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a related field with additional cloud certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of experience in cloud operations, cloud engineering, systems administration, or DevOps roles with hands-on public cloud experience.

Preferred: 5+ years experience designing and operating production cloud environments, proven track record with cloud migrations, Infrastructure-as-Code, container orchestration, and security/compliance implementations.

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