What it Takes to Get to the Cloud

Featured article by Antonella Corno, Senior Manager, Product Strategy, Learning@Cisco

IDC forecasts that 65 percent of organizations’ IT assets will be offsite, in co-located, hosting and cloud data centers, by 2018. One-third of IT professionals will be working at third-party service providers.

As cloud becomes increasingly popular, it is contributing to an industry-wide shortage of cloud skills. Global Knowledge in 2015 found that one out of five decision-makers was having difficulty finding talent with the skills for cloud initiatives, while cloud computing jobs were one of the highest paying, with a mean salary of $102,000.

For network and data center professionals who have the right training and certifications, this presents a significant opportunity for career advancement and success. For those weighing a career in IT, cloud skills are in high demand and worth pursuing.

Cloud Means Options

One cloud does not fit all, so there is no agreement on whether public, private or hybrid clouds are best. It depends entirely on each organization, along with the type of data it generates and uses. Organizations using the public cloud rely on the resources of third-party service providers for cloud storage or online accounting software. The biggest argument in its favor is cost. Organizations can rent public cloud services for monthly or annual fees and it’s up to the provider to keep them running, accessible and updated.

Some providers are going beyond this software as a service (SaaS) model to offer platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). PaaS enables an application to run one different infrastructures. IaaS makes an entire infrastructure available as a rentable service.

While these offerings on the public cloud have their benefits, there are issues as well. One of them is security and another is accessibility. Data on the public cloud may not be as secure as it should be, especially if it is sensitive financial or health information that is regulated. Also, if the Internet is down, then the data and the application may not be available when the organization needs them.

These are the issues that are leading more and more organizations to set up and maintain their own (private) clouds. Organizations use private clouds to make their data more secure and to arrange them the way they prefer. They are not interested in selling SaaS but want the benefits of the cloud. The downside is the expense, which can be very big, and the need to hire scarce IT professionals with cloud expertise.

What’s helpful about the hybrid cloud is that it combines both approaches. Organizations keep sensitive data more secure on an internally managed private cloud. They then use the public cloud when needed, like in peak demand periods, when individual applications can be sent to the public cloud. Hybrids are also helpful during rough weather, scheduled maintenance or rolling brownouts or blackouts. IDC predicts that 80 percent of enterprise IT organizations will commit to the hybrid cloud by 2017.

Skilling Up to the Cloud

Whichever cloud type an organization picks, the next challenge is finding IT professionals with certain cloud skills. Some of the fundamental skills are cloud migration and cloud security.

Both hands-on skills and conceptual knowledge are important; cloud skills training and certification courses should provide a combined approach. Among the topics covered should be:

– Cloud Design (private, public, hybrid)

– Cloud systems management

– Cloud Security

– Automation and Orchestration concepts and tools, including controllers and Policy Based approach

– Application provisioning and lifecycle management

Migration to the cloud continues to grow in popularity, but many companies have not yet made the move. They need IT professionals who have a solid grounding in the varying models for clouds. They also need to know how to map the organization’s current IT infrastructure, including its applications and workloads on existing servers, and how to send all of what they have mapped to a cloud equivalent. The larger the organization, the more complicated this becomes.

Data security is a priority across all sectors, from mom-and-pop e-tailers to multinational corporations, and that concern extends to an organization’s cloud. So, it’s no surprise that cloud security is another major skill for IT professionals. Almost every day brings news of yet more data breaches. How to keep data secure, how to build and maintain secure platforms, and securing cloud infrastructure are all high-demand skills.

SaaS, PaaS and IaaS skills are also needed. Organizations need IT professionals with the knowhow to develop and work with cloud applications. The same applies to cloud platforms and infrastructures. This means they should be fluent cloud programming languages like Python, Perl and Ruby along with traditional languages like .NET, Java and PHP. Linux skills are also in high demand.

Also in high demand: expertise with cloud databases. Every day, the Internet of Things generates quintillions of bytes of data. Organizations want most to uncover insights and new markets from this tsunami of data, and they need IT professionals with cloud database querying skills. SQL along with open source languages like MySQL, Hadoop or Mongo DB are worth learning.

Forging a Cloud Future

Whether public, private or hybrid, cloud is a business necessity today. Organizations are in need of employees with cloud expertise, but the IT personnel shortage is making it hard to find them. Fortunately for IT professionals who have or are willing to acquire the needed cloud skills and certifications, job security and higher salaries await. These individuals can help organizations create greater business agility and reduce spending on IT architecture by driving cloud deployments in a consistent and centralized manner.

About the Author

Antonella Corno has 20+ years of experience in the IT industry, as part of a career spanning two continents (Europe and North America), in several leading IT companies, most recently at Cisco. While she has been in technology R&D for most of her career, her interest has recently shifted to the training and certifications that are supporting and enabling the workforce of the future, and is she now responsible for the Application, Software and Cloud Team within the Product Strategy group in Learning@Cisco.

Antonella is a CCIE Emeritus, has been a speaker at several international conferences, and holds a number of international patents.