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Mid-Year Cloud Jobs Update: Get Noticed, Get Your Head in the Cloud
As we enter the second half of 2014, people who know their way around security, application interconnectivity, mobility and high-performance computing are hot in the cloud job market.
3 Min Read
We’re well into June already and the cloud world continues to speed up. New types of delivery models, improved optimizations and better infrastructure convergence mechanisms are all impacting how we utilize the modern data center. Through it all – the engineer, architect and IT professional must continue to evolve alongside technology and the business organization.
So what’s new? Over the past few months a few new types of platforms and technologies are creating increased demands from evolving businesses. If you’re in the cloud job world – here are a few things to keep an eye on:
Security. This is really a growing area of expertise. A variety of healthcare breaches, the Target incident and more recently Heartbleed have all created a lot of demand for good security professionals. More than anything – these professionals must be fluent in the language of cloud and ecosystem interoperability. There is a growing need for the ever-effective whitehat security professional. New types of advanced persistent threats aimed at a variety of logical and physical resources have created a new type of dynamic in the security industry. If you’re an IT professional, it’s time to take a look at the very many security concepts that are currently impacting your environment.
Application interconnectivity. Cloud computing and the modern data center are already interconnected. Now, applications and the data that supports it all are becoming even more distributed. Cloud and application professionals are finding new ways to deliver rich content to a variety of users and end-points. These apps must be agile, secure and always keep the user’s performance in mind. There is a shift happening around mobility and a movement away from the modern desktop. Now it’s the world of cloud computing and application delivery. HTML5 and new types of web delivery methodologies allow us to interact with online applications much more than ever before.
Mobility architecture. The topic of mobility is not going anywhere. Within just a few years there will be more cloud-connected devices than there are people on this planet. All of the data, applications, workloads, and delivery methodologies around mobility have to be planned out and architected. Here’s the important point: this isn’t like deploying a desktop or a laptop. Mobility architecture is a new breed of end-point computing. It revolves around a new type of user and supports a new type of organization -- a next-generation one. Applying aging concepts like desktop or end-point deployment simply won’t cut it. As a cloud professional, begin to examine the implications of mobility and how it can all be optimized. Organizations are actively jumping on the mobility bandwagon, mainly because of the demands from the end-user.
High-performance computing. So here’s a bit of a curve ball. Modern enterprises are finding new ways to apply data research to create powerful quantitative results. The high-performance computing community is gaining a lot of traction. Even large shops like VMware are now actively looking at ways to optimize and virtualize HPC workloads. Scalability and the capability to process critical web-based workloads has become a necessary component for many modern enterprises. Prediction engines – ones that predict geological events for example – are being built on HPC workloads. This is certainly an interesting area to explore.
No doubt that the cloud environment is going to facilitate new types of careers and opportunities. Now, organizations are creating their entire business model around the capabilities of their data center and their cloud. This means the modern cloud engineer is becoming a critical piece of the entire organization. Remember, it’s not all about the techie side of things. It’s important to understand and articulate how modern technologies can positively impact your business. This means discussing benefits with key business stakeholders. Ultimately – this will help you get noticed in your organization as well as help keep both your business and IT infrastructure proactive in the industry.
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