How to Upgrade Your IT Skill Set for Cloud

Cloud is becoming a mainstream platform for IT solutions. Are you ready to take advantage of the opportunity for your company and your career?

Moving processes and systems to cloud-based solutions requires IT personnel to gain not only new tech expertise, but also savvy critical thinking skills that enable them to understand cloud solutions' performance, operation and risks.

Migrating email and select IT systems to the cloud was just the latest technology transition for Vandegrift Forwarding Company, a 60-year-old customs broker based in Jersey City, N. J., and it put the company's IT staff on a major learning curve.

Last year, Vandegrift transitioned its email from a Microsoft Exchange platform to Gmail, and has built its customer-facing Intranet processes on an Amazon Web Services-hosted cloud platform. Smaller cloud providers provide Vandegrift with other solutions for CRM and project management systems.

"We're not moving to the cloud just to move to the cloud," said Brian Glick, Vandegrift's vice president of global information services. "The cloud is a tool to reduce cost and make collaboration easier."

Collaboration with clients and client suppliers is the customs broker's lifeblood. Vandegrift operates out of 10 offices in the United States, Canada and Hong Kong, receiving information via email and/or electronic data interchange (EDI) from thousands of its clients' trading partners in 20 different countries.

The ultimate goal is to bring the company's employee-to-server ratio from about 0.7 before transition to about 0.1 to 0.2. "We're not reducing the hardware footprint," Glick said. "It's the maintenance. How many servers do you have to patch if something goes down?"

Vandegrift's IT staff of analysts and network administrators learned new technologies and a new IT mindset as they planned, developed and implemented the company's cloud solutions.

"The multiple layers of the cloud forced the analyst to think about workflow and interplay between systems, because we're no longer in an isolated mainframe environment," Glick said. "It forced the infrastructure people to learn how to be software people."

Vandegrift's IT staff were accustomed to working hands-on with network connections and vendor-issued software within the walls of their company offices. Adopting cloud solutions, they had to learn to write programming scripts and employ open source tools to help with their cloud system migration and maintenance. "When you move to the cloud, everyone becomes a programmer," Glick said.

Knowing how to critically vet cloud vendors was also extremely important. "You can't just think, 'They have a really nice website, they must be competent,' " Glick said. "You have to ask the sobering questions: What are you going to do if you lose your data set? What's our exit strategy if you go bankrupt?"

Sidestepping FUD

FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt — can be IT workers' biggest obstacle to working with cloud, said Adam Hansen, startup liaison for cloud hosting service provider Rackspace. "No one likes change."

Developers who have researched and understand cloud solutions quickly see cloud's advantages, but IT staff executing upper management decisions to adopt cloud solutions may feel their hands are being forced. Some may need to be convinced to abandon hardware that hasn't yet reached its peak return on investment.

"What people are really looking for are price and how-to's," Hansen said. "Other than that, they can't wait to start using cloud."

Cloud's technical learning curve can involve learning to use a vendor's control panels or navigate its processes. But the bigger change occurs in mindset when working with an IT system in which the company no longer directly controls the hardware.

"People just like being able to touch things," Hansen said. "The cloud doesn't afford that."

One of the most frequent requests from new Rackspace customers is to see its physical cloud infrastructure. "It looks no different than any other data center," says Hansen, "but I think it provides peace of mind for folks."

Ultimately, Hansen doesn't believe cloud changes the role of IT professionals, but he does note that cloud definitely changes how things get done and how fast they get done. For example, the addition of five servers can be accomplished by clicking an "add a server" button five times instead of submitting a work-order ticket and waiting a week. Or an automated tool might scale the system's capacity. With IT speeds increasing, "Folks now have the ability to react to large traffic spikes or last minute deadlines with ease rather than failure," Hansen said.

The Big Picture Shift

Cloud is prompting these types of transitions in mindset and technical skill all over the country. CompTIA recently found that more than eight out of 10 companies use some form of cloud solution, with more than half of those companies relying on cloud for at least 20 percent of their overall IT architecture. Many companies are beginning to assume that cloud solutions will be used when they plan IT projects.

Research firm IDC notes that "Most agree that cloud computing could become the key delivery model for computing by 2030." In its Microsoft-sponsored report, "Climate Change: Cloud's Impact on IT Organizations and Staffing," IDC predicts there will be about 2.7 million cloud-related IT jobs in North America by the end of 2015, after growing about 22 percent per year from 2012. IDC research suggests there were as many as 1.7 million open requisitions for cloud-related IT jobs worldwide in 2012. "The single most important factor hiring managers cite for failing to fill those jobs is a lack of appropriately skilled candidates," the report stated.

Top areas where businesses need cloud expertise include:

• Integration of cloud systems and on-premises systems
• Skills for building private clouds
• Departmental liaisons to understand IT needs of business units
• Cloud architects to oversee cloud usage
• Compliance specialists

Hiring managers look for certifications, training and experience when hiring IT staff for cloud roles, but IDC anticipates an early industry reliance on certification and training: "Because relatively few IT professionals are experienced with cloud, appropriate training and certification will play an essential role in preparing IT professionals for the evolving IT organization."

Cloud Certs

Vendor-specific certifications are available from the likes of Microsoft, IBM, VMware, Google and Rackspace. CompTIA is one of the few to offer a vendor-neutral credential: the CompTIA Cloud Essentials certification, which is a collaboration with ITPreneurs, a competence development program provider.

ITpreneurs, headquartered in Rotterrdam, Netherlands, developed the Cloud Essentials exam objectives with input from the independent and vendor-neutral Cloud Credential Council. Exam content is based on consultation and insights from leading subject matter experts and organizations in the cloud computing market, including Amazon, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace and VMware.

Domains covered by the CompTIA Cloud Essentials exam include:

• Cloud Services from a Business Perspective: Terms and definitions, and the relationship between cloud computing and virtualization.
• Cloud Computing And Business Value: The business parameters for evaluating the value of clouds and cloud services.
• Technical Perspectives on Cloud Types: Techniques and methods for cloud solutions deployment and risk mitigation.
• Steps to Successful Adoption of Cloud Computing: Pilot criteria, connecting deployment to organizational goals and the organizational capabilities needed to realize benefits from cloud solutions.
• Impact and Changes of Cloud Computing on IT Service Management: Effect on service strategy, design, operation and transition.
• Risks & Consequences of Cloud Computing: How a cloud solution can impact security, legal, compliance and privacy risks.

Cloud Essentials courseware from ITpreneurs and other CompTIA strategic partners, including Logical Operations and uCertify, can be found on the CompTIA Store.

Originally published in Cloud Nation, 2/4/13.