Are you a "cloud-ready" IT worker?
At a time when much of the global jobs market is painfully contracting, one~field is bucking the trend. According to a study by market intelligence firm IDC, almost 1.7 million cloud-related jobs were unfilled in 2012. Demand for “cloud-ready” IT workers is also likely to grow 26% annually through to 2015.
While training and certification programs~are helping to meet this shortage, many employees are having to quickly develop their cloud-based skills at work.~With this in mind, here are 5 ways~IT administrators, operators and engineers~can take advantage of this golden era of cloud computing and develop those in-demand cloud-based skills.
#1 Get to know the business.
Business and technology have a symbiotic relationship, especially~where ecommerce is concerned. So take an interest in the business, understand the customers’ wants and needs and get to know their pain points. You may have to go to a few more business meetings, you may even have to improve your communication skills, but as technology and business become increasingly intertwined, limiting yourself to IT won’t just~damage the business. It could threaten your job role.
#2 Balance IT logic with practical skills
We’re not implying a cloud engineer needs to be a ‘jack of all trades’, rather that they need an understanding of different technologies and platforms to do the job well. So while the cloud engineer may have specific areas of expertise in programming such as Python, Java or C++, having a good grasp of the physical components of an organisation’s network~will better equip you to understand how different technologies interact with the cloud.
#3 Take an interest in operations
Outages can cost a business dearly. They can also have significant legal impact if data is lost. Creating the infrastructure resiliency to prevent and handle events is therefore a critical part of a cloud engineer’s remit. What would you do if an app went down? How would you handle continuity? Putting together a solid Data Recovery (DR) strategy and planning replication requires more than questions however, it calls for knowledge of common date center outage problems and an~understanding of how the cloud environment behaves.
#4 Think outside the box.
When working with cloud computing, the mind can be as powerful as the wallet, so think creatively about solving problems. For instance, virtualization, high-density computing and other technologies can dramatically optimize your cloud environment. The key is having the knowledge to know where these solutions fit in.
#5 Stay up-to-date on security.
Having a broad understanding of how applications interconnect with the cloud, their impact on the end user and~security implications is essential. New technologies such as powerful application firewalls and heuristic learning engines understand and learn the normal behavior of an application and can lock down an application if they suspect unusual activity. Staying up-to-date with next generation technologies so you can provide better security and privacy is a top priority for cloud engineers.