Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Business Analyst

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Business Analyst is a cross-functional analyst and product-focused specialist who translates business needs into cloud-enabled solutions, drives cloud adoption and migration planning, and optimizes cost, security and operational processes for cloud services. This role partners with engineering, architecture, finance (FinOps), security and business stakeholders to define requirements, prioritize backlogs, validate solutions, and measure business value delivered through cloud initiatives (AWS, Azure, GCP, or multi-cloud environments). The Cloud Business Analyst blends business analysis, data analytics, cloud economics, and project facilitation to enable scalable, secure and cost-efficient cloud transformations.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Business Analyst with exposure to cloud or SaaS environments
Systems Analyst or Data Analyst working on cloud-enabled projects
Cloud Operations or IT Analyst transitioning into product/requirements work

Advancement To:

Senior Cloud Business Analyst / Lead Business Analyst
Cloud Product Owner or Cloud Program Manager
Cloud Strategy Manager or Director of Cloud Transformation

Lateral Moves:

Cloud FinOps Analyst / Cloud Cost Manager
Cloud Solutions Consultant or Pre-Sales Cloud Analyst

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead discovery workshops with product owners, engineering teams, security, compliance, and finance to elicit, document, and prioritize business and technical requirements for cloud migration, modernization and new cloud-native projects.
Translate stakeholder goals into user stories, acceptance criteria, EPICs and measurable KPIs that inform cloud architecture decisions and product backlogs, ensuring traceability from business objectives to technical deliverables.
Conduct cloud readiness assessments and develop migration roadmaps that include application dependency mapping, re-platform or re-architect recommendations, migration sequencing, and risk mitigation plans for AWS/Azure/GCP.
Perform cost modeling and cloud financial analysis (FinOps) including TCO comparisons, cost forecasts, tagging and chargeback strategies, and continuous cost optimization recommendations using CloudHealth, AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management or equivalent.
Work with cloud architects and DevOps teams to define integration points, API requirements, event-driven architectures, and data flow diagrams to ensure secure and performant cloud-native designs.
Define and track business value metrics, service-level objectives (SLOs) and operational KPIs for cloud services (e.g., availability, latency, cost per transaction, RTO/RPO) and report outcomes to business stakeholders.
Drive stakeholder alignment and decision-making through structured analysis, impact assessment, and prioritization of cloud features, migrations and technical debt remediation.
Lead user acceptance testing (UAT) planning and execution for cloud migrations and releases; validate acceptance criteria, coordinate cross-functional testers, and document defects and remediation steps.
Partner with security and compliance teams to capture, analyze and translate regulatory requirements (SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR, HIPAA) into cloud controls, IAM policies, and logging/monitoring requirements.
Create and maintain comprehensive requirements artifacts including business capability maps, use cases, process flows, data models and functional specifications tailored for cloud implementations.
Define data migration and data governance strategies, including data classification, retention, encryption, and integration patterns to ensure integrity and compliance during cloud migration projects.
Facilitate agile ceremonies (sprint planning, backlog refinement, retrospectives) and act as the voice of the customer in sprint teams to maximize delivery of cloud product increments.
Analyze application performance and monitoring data to recommend rightsizing, autoscaling, and architectural changes that improve cost efficiency and application reliability in cloud environments.
Manage vendor relationships and vendor assessments for SaaS and managed cloud services; evaluate third-party SLAs, pricing models, integration capabilities and security postures.
Support proof-of-concept (PoC) activities by defining success criteria, preparing test data, coordinating stakeholders, and capturing lessons learned for scalable cloud solution rollouts.
Document runbooks, operational runbooks and escalation paths for cloud services to support SRE/operations and to reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) and operational risk.
Collaborate with data engineering and BI teams to produce dashboards and analytic models (Power BI, Tableau, Looker) that surface cloud usage, cost, security incidents and business outcomes to senior leadership.
Conduct stakeholder training, change management activities and communications to ensure adoption of new cloud capabilities and operational practices.
Provide business-case development support including ROI analysis, benefit articulation, scenario modeling and executive-ready briefings for cloud investments.
Define migration success criteria, acceptance sign-offs, and post-migration validation plans including performance, security, and business process verification.
Monitor industry cloud best practices and emerging cloud services (serverless, containers, Kubernetes, managed databases) and recommend adoption strategies aligned to business objectives.
Maintain traceability of regulatory and contractual requirements through the solution lifecycle and support audit readiness activities for cloud systems.

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.
Assist with preparing RFPs and evaluating proposals for cloud services or managed service providers.
Help define tagging, metering and reporting standards to enable chargeback and showback across business units.
Produce and update stakeholder-facing documentation, runbooks and onboarding materials for cloud products and services.
Provide subject matter expertise for cross-functional design reviews and change advisory board (CAB) meetings.
Assist in incident retrospectives and continuous improvement initiatives to reduce reoccurrence of cloud-related incidents.
Monitor cloud compliance dashboards and assist in remediation coordination for identified control gaps.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Cloud Platforms: Hands-on knowledge of at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform) and familiarity with common services (EC2/VMs, S3/Blob Storage, RDS/Cloud SQL, Lambda/Functions, Kubernetes/GKE/AKS/EKS).
Cloud Migration & Modernization: Experience performing application discovery, dependency mapping, lift-and-shift, re-platform and re-architect migration approaches.
FinOps & Cost Management: Proficient in cloud cost analysis, TCO modeling, budget forecasting, and using tools such as AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, CloudHealth or Cloudability.
Data & Analytics: Strong SQL skills for data pulls and analysis; familiarity with data warehousing, ETL/ELT patterns and BI tools like Power BI, Tableau or Looker.
APIs & Integration: Understanding of RESTful APIs, message queues, event streams and integration patterns to define integration requirements and validate solutions.
Security & Compliance: Knowledge of IAM, encryption, logging, monitoring and compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI, GDPR) and how they map to cloud controls.
Requirements & Process Modeling: Ability to produce user stories, acceptance criteria, UML/BPMN process flows, business capability maps and data models.
Agile Tools & Collaboration: Proficient with Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps and agile product management practices.
Scripting & Automation: Basic scripting or familiarity with automation (Python, Bash, PowerShell, or IaC tools like Terraform/ARM templates/CloudFormation) to communicate feasibility with engineering teams.
Monitoring & Observability: Familiar with monitoring and logging tools (CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Datadog, Splunk) and establishing SLOs/SLIs.
Testing & UAT: Experience designing test plans, coordinating UAT and validating acceptance criteria for cloud deployments.
Vendor & Contract Evaluation: Ability to evaluate vendor offerings, SLAs, pricing models and contractual obligations for cloud and SaaS providers.

Soft Skills

Stakeholder Management: Strong ability to lead cross-functional workshops, align competing priorities and maintain stakeholder buy-in through clear communication.
Analytical Thinking: Senior-level problem solving with quantitative analysis, ability to synthesize data into actionable recommendations and business cases.
Communication & Presentation: Excellent written and verbal communication skills for executive briefings, status reports and training materials.
Prioritization & Decision Making: Skilled at applying value/effort frameworks, MOSCOW or WSJF to prioritize features and migration waves.
Facilitation & Negotiation: Comfortable facilitating complex discussions, negotiating trade-offs and guiding consensus across technical and business groups.
Change Management: Experience creating adoption plans, communications and training to drive behavioral change for cloud operating models.
Detail Orientation: Strong documentation habits and attention to detail to ensure regulatory requirements and acceptance criteria are met.
Collaboration & Teamwork: Proven ability to work effectively with product, engineering, security, finance and operations teams in an agile environment.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Analytics, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Cloud Computing, Data Science, Business Analytics, or MBA with technology focus.
Professional certifications such as CBAP, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner / AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Microsoft AZ-900/AZ-204, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, or FinOps Certified Practitioner are strongly preferred.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Business Analysis and Systems Engineering
Cloud Computing, Computer Science or Information Technology
Data Analytics, Information Systems, Finance/Accounting for FinOps roles

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3 to 7 years of progressive experience in business analysis, cloud projects, or IT delivery with at least 2 years working directly on cloud-related initiatives.

Preferred:

5+ years experience with demonstrated success in cloud migration, cloud cost optimization (FinOps), or cloud product ownership.
Prior exposure to multi-cloud environments, SaaS/vendor evaluations, regulatory compliance for cloud systems, and cross-functional stakeholder leadership.