Cloud is changing the IT Professional's Skills

The shift from “traditional” IT to cloud IT is well and truly underway. Many public, private organisations and government agencies are moving a part or all of their IT systems into the cloud. The move to the cloud has resulted in a big change in the types of skills required by IT Professionals in these organisations.

The traditional model of computing saw a high demand for people with skills to manage and administering hardware, operating systems, building servers, installing and configuring software. These purely technical tasks were time consuming and were often a manual process that took a lot of time and effort just to “keep the lights on”.

The shift to cloud computing has enabled much of this type of heavy lifting to be fully or semi-automated. To this end IT professional will need to acquire the technical knowledge to not only work with the enabling technologies and but also higher level skills to select the right technologies and services to use and design how to fit these services will together to form the overall system.

The cloud will also force IT professionals to take on more business skills and be more attuned with the needs of the business. As much of the technical complexity of the traditional computing is transitioned to cloud providers, to stay relevant and keep their jobs, IT professionals will need to provide value to the business in new ways which include providing technology strategy. The explosion in choices of cloud application and services means they will need to help the business to select, manage and integrate those services chosen by the business. In addition, they will need to be able to successfully manage the relationship with cloud vendors to ensure the services provided are fit for purpose and value for money.

The cloud and the availability of reliable cheap storage together with the “Internet of Things” will enable businesses to collect and store more data than ever. There will be an dramatic increase in demand for those IT professionals who are skilled in collecting, organising, processing, backing up and optimising huge data sets stored in a variety of cloud based database technologies and services.

Software developers will also be heavily affected as the level of automation and speed of data processing will force software engineers to adopt a “Dev Ops” operations model whereby the software development team must work closely with the infrastructure and operations teams to streamline and the building, testing and delivery of software.

In the new world of Cloud Computing, new skills will be required of IT professionals. Software engineers (programmers) and software architects will at minimum need to be able to design and build applications that can be hosted on cloud infrastructure and ideally make the most use of the flexibility and scalability afforded from cloud computing. They must understand and adhere to multi-tier architecture and design applications where the presentation, logic and data tiers are not closely coupled. The ease of achieving high levels of automation in Cloud Computing means software developers will need to adopt the practice of “DevOps” where software is built, tested and released in a rapid, frequent and more reliable fashion through process automation.

Cloud Computing is probably the biggest paradigm shift in IT since the move away from centralise main frames to personal computers. IT professionals will need to adapt and skill themselves with cloud computing technologies to ensure their relevancy in this new environment.

For several years now, PicNet has migrate its key business critical IT systems to the cloud. PicNet takes a “cloud first” when implementing new systems or system upgrades. For an obligation free consultation on migrating your IT services to the cloud, contact PicNet.

Tagged: #cloud-computing #devops #employment #skills