The gist is that its going to take a while for the large scale shift to Cloud having an effect on IT workers.
The summary on how to prepare at the end of the article is
So what should today's IT employee do to protect his or her career? "Look for the skills the company is going to need five years from now, not now, and start building them," advises Forrester's Schadler. "These include vendor contract management, integration with the cloud, analytics, rich lightweight Internet workforce applications, mobile applications -- these are all skills for the next decade," he says.
"Try to get work with an infrastructure provider rather than an internal company system," advises Terrosa's Terry. "Develop an expertise on a particular high-end technology environment, such as virtualization or storage area networking. Or get some experience managing a SaaS provider. Embrace the cloud, don't fight it," he says.
What's that? Develop expertise in virtualisation and SANs. I think they left out networking. Given the network centric nature of Cloud services I believe the management, availability and optimisation of networks will also be critical (keep those Cisco cert's up).
Sounds like all the people in the circles I travel in are well set in their career path for the next few years.
"Embrace the cloud, don't fight it."
Rodos
Rodos, one thing that cloud computing is going to do is yet again raise the technical level required to work in this environment. Good for the high end guys, not so good for IT Joe with an A+ certificate and paper MCSE.
ReplyDeleteIt can't be a bad thing. Each time the skill level required gets higher, good IT skills get more scarce.