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Future Proof Your IT Job: What You Need to Know about the Cloud & Your Business in 2017

January 11, 2017 No Comments

Featured Article By Kirill Bensonoff, Founder of Unigma

If you’ve worked in IT for very long, you’ve seen a lot of changes as businesses have started the journey to cloud. As an IT professional, you have a choice. You can fight the change (good luck with that!) and try to keep all technologies on-premise, or you can accept the change and help your company make a successful transition.

While it may seem safe to keep your servers and software on-premise, there are certain dangers in doing this. By keeping your software on site, you face the following issues:

No disaster recovery: Smaller businesses typically do not have the budget for a thorough disaster recovery plan. By moving more processes off-site, you can transition more of your disaster recovery plan to your service provider, making it their responsibility.

Having to ask for a huge capital expense: Starting up and maintaining a data center can be a huge capital expense and few IT people want to go to management and ask for this. With cloud, you can get a reasonable monthly payment that is easier to get past management.

Lack of flexibility: Are you looking for an easy way to help your company stay competitive? Moving to the cloud can allow your smaller company to compete with larger ones. Cloud can help a small business to disrupt the market and continue to run lean and nimble and outperform competitors. Increasing capacity with on-site servers requires a large capital expense of new hardware and additional licenses. With cloud, you are able to scale up or down as needed to match the resources you need.

Security concerns: How many times have you worried about opening a hole in your firewall so that workers can get access from the Internet when they are out in the field? With cloud, the vendor handles the security so you don’t have to. This allows employees to collaborate from anywhere with fewer security concerns.

Future Proof Your Job in 2017: Become Your In-House Cloud Expert

In order to future proof your position in the face of wholesale move to IaaS clouds, the key to success is to become your in-house cloud expert so you can help your business make the transition as efficiently as possible.

Start with the basics: Cloud is more elastic and requires a new way of thinking about how you can scale to meet demand. This is important for both developers and operators who need to think about managing workloads and balancing costs. DevOps brings development and operations together and in order to learn it you need a good understanding of containers, virtualization, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Once you have an understanding of the basics, you can start looking at specific cloud providers.

Get real world experience: The good news is that getting experience with the cloud service provider is easy because the major platforms will let you try it for free to see if it is a good match for your business. These trials will allow you to get your hands dirty and get real world experience without spending a lot of money.

Keep up with the new technologies: While software engineers and architects will need to have a mastery of cloud, it’s also important for IT to be able to make informed decisions about cloud technology.

Optimize for success: Learning how to optimize cloud properly means balancing scale with the financial needs of the company. This will allow you to save the company money and scale up or down to meet seasonal needs.

Get certified: Getting certified in cloud is a great way to show potential employers that you know your stuff.

Conclusion

Following these simple steps, you can future proof your IT job, help your business transition to cloud, and become a vital part of your organization as you optimize cloud to give them the best value for their money.

kirill-high-res-2017

About the Author: Kirill Bensonoff is a seasoned entrepreneur and the founder of Unigma, a unified cloud management platform. Unigma has been featured in a number of publications, and Kirill blogs regularly about cloud, tech and growing your managed services business. He can be reached at kirill@unigma.com.

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