Find Your Opportunity in the Cloud

With all the promise of exciting innovation and improved efficiencies that are to come from the IT world’s evolution to the Cloud, there also comes a bit of fear and hesitation with where the journey will take us.  We as human beings are pre-programmed to resist change in certain capacities as a defense- mechanism to protect ourselves from looming threat. For many IT professionals, that perceived threat is that our expertise in the on-premise world will become obsolete, no longer needed.  Often times the fears of job instability and loss of security can draw our attention away from the benefits that our organisation’s move to the Cloud will offer and thus make us resist this coming change.

But what we also know is that when we choose to “look on the bright side” when dealing with these fears, we might realize that we can begin to minimise them by educating ourselves on what the Cloud evolution really means so that we can start involving ourselves in the process.  The more we know, the more we can contribute and the more likely we will be called upon to be a key player in the journey.

  “Companies that instill the knowledge and understanding their IT professionals and developers require in making the transition to

cloud based skills will enable transition to the cloud both more successfully and more profitably."

In that light, the imminent question we must ask ourselves is:

What can we do to prepare?

Microsoft has recently published a white paper, outlining the essential skills IT professionals should consider enhancing as the landscape of the IT world continues to take flight into the Cloud.

Does your career fit into any of the following roles? Read below to get an idea of skill development needed for specific IT management functions:

"Critical Skills by IT Job Role"

The following are job roles and skills the IT professional can invest in:

Business liaison: Move skills up the stack in the decision process. Hone expertise to the business from within IT. Move into design and architecture roles. Determine whether to focus in-house or off-premise, define options whether the organization decides to stay on-premise or moves to the cloud.

Datacenter manager: Reposition datacenter skills toward the hosted datacenter. Enhance automation skills. Work in standardized environments and with standardized applications as an option. Become good at management applications, scripting, and performance optimization. Acquire best practices skills, such as information services technology management.

Security specialist: Help businesses move core business processes and data securely to private, public, or hybrid cloud solutions. Security specialists need to stay abreast of new security models and technologies, such as data protection skills, privacy standards, securing message integrity (encryption, digital signing and malware protection), federated identity management, authentication methods, and auditing. Organizations need to have security- and compliance-certified employees.

Software architect: Serve as a link between the organization’s technical and business staff. Architects are asked to design and build complex distributed systems that exist both outside and
inside an enterprise and the cloud. They need to acquire the new skills required to build infrastructure, platform, and software clouds. They need to understand how to design and construct multi-tenant and virtualized systems that can manage thousands of simultaneous users and isolate higher levels of the stack from physical component failures.

Finally, the move to the Cloud will lead to dramatic transformations in how Business units communicate with the IT Unit at firms. Conversations between the entities will become less and less focused on discrete pieces of technology software and hardware, and more and more about the value-added services that are supported by the behind-the-scenes work of the IT unit.  It won’t be just about technical skill in the very near future.  Make no mistake, we all (regardless of our role in the IT front) must continuously develop our own soft skills as IT professionals will become increasingly called upon to serve as communication ambassadors for IT to other business units.

It would be a worthy investment of time to seek out courses that will help develop the essential soft skills we will need as it becomes more and more about articulating business value in the context of IT management.  For the technical skills outlined above in the role-based descriptors, consider leveraging your Premier Support agreement with Microsoft to get access to affordable, high-quality training by Subject Matter Experts.  Premier Support has access to a pool of world-class engineers who are highly-skilled at sharing their expertise in all areas, including virtualision, security compliance and protection, scripting & automation, as well as process optimisation. 

Ready to get started?  Give Premier Support Ireland a shout, and start finding your own opportunity in the Cloud.

Sources:  

Resistance to Change: 

https://changingminds.org/disciplines/change_management/resistance_change/resistance_change.htm

Microsoft Cloud Whitepaper:

https://partner.microsoft.com/global/40175589?msp_id=rssgloballearnsol156