About this role
The On Premise & Azure Cloud Hosting Service Owner is accountable for the strategy, performance, and lifecycle management of the organisation’s hosting services across both traditional data centre environments and Microsoft Azure. This role ensures that compute, storage, virtualisation, backup, and cloud hosting platforms are secure, resilient, cost optimised, and aligned with business needs. Acting as the authoritative owner of hosting services, the Service Owner defines the service roadmap, governs operational processes, and ensures that hosting platforms—whether on premise or cloud—deliver consistent, high quality outcomes. They work closely with infrastructure teams, cloud engineers, security, architecture, and external service providers to maintain service stability, manage capacity, and drive continuous improvement. The successful candidate combines deep technical understanding of hosting technologies with strong service management discipline. They provide leadership during major incidents, oversee change governance, manage vendor performance, and ensure that hosting services evolve in line with modern cloud and hybrid cloud strategies. Own the full lifecycle of on-premise and Azure cloud hosting services, including compute, storage, virtualisation, backup, and platform services. Define and maintain the service strategy, roadmap, and service catalogue entries. Ensure hosting services meet performance, availability, security, and cost efficiency targets. Oversee datacentre hosting platforms (VMware/Hyper V, physical servers, SAN/NAS storage, backup infrastructure). Ensure capacity, performance, and resilience are proactively managed. Govern patching, firmware updates, hardware lifecycle, and platform upgrades. Govern Azure landing zones, resource groups, compute, storage, networking, and PaaS services. Ensure cloud environments follow best practices for cost optimisation, tagging, RBAC, and security baselines. Oversee Azure policy compliance, monitoring, and automation pipelines. Ensure patching, firmware, and hypervisor updates are consistently applied. Proactively identify capacity risks, ageing hardware, and end of support technologies. Enforce Azure governance (naming standards, tagging, RBAC, policy compliance). Monitor and remediate security recommendations (Defender for Cloud, identity hygiene). Ensure unused, misconfigured, or non compliant resources are removed or corrected. Maintain accurate CMDB and asset data for all hosting components. Ensure backup success rates, retention policies, and recovery tests meet standards. Drive automation to reduce manual effort and eliminate configuration drift. Act as the hosting service authority during major incidents affecting compute, storage, or cloud services. Ensure platform upgrades and migrations follow structured release processes. Track and report on hosting performance, capacity, cost, and incident trends. Use data to identify service gaps, risks, and opportunities for improvement. Provide regular service health updates to IT leadership and key stakeholders. Manage relationships with hosting vendors, cloud providers, MSPs, and hardware suppliers. Ensure vendors meet contractual obligations, SLAs, and performance targets. Lead service reviews and drive improvement actions across multi vendor environments. Ensure hosting services comply with security policies, regulatory requirements, and audit standards. Work with Security teams to manage vulnerabilities, patching, encryption, and identity controls. Maintain risk registers and ensure mitigation plans are in place for hosting related risks. Act as the primary point of contact for hosting service queries, escalations, and strategic discussions. Collaborate with architects, cloud engineers, application teams, and project managers. Support business change initiatives by ensuring hosting services are ready, scalable, and secure. Ensure all hosting documentation, runbooks, and operational guides are accurate and up to date. Maintain architectural diagrams, service models, and support processes. Provide training and guidance to operational teams on hosting standards and best practices.