Cloud Computing Promises New Opportunities For IT Personnel

Where do you find the real value in the data center?

As technologists, we get our thrills from the latest application release, add-on, or widget. It’s the nature of the beast. But, it’s not the new features or advanced capabilities that deliver the real value to the data center; it’s the IT personnel who wield the tools. A data center is only as good as its staff.

As discussed in a previous post about filling the IT skills gap, as technology evolves, so do the skill sets needed to harness the promise of cloud computing. Fortunately, for those people whose pay check depends on it, the trend leans strongly toward retraining rather than replacing existing staff on the new concepts and technologies that make up the cloud. But, it is not only the hard skill needs that have changed; soft skill requirements have changed too. New personas have been emerging around cloud and tenant administration. Additionally, it should come as no surprise that the business analyst function has seen a rebirth given the interest in Big Data analytics for business intelligence.

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A New Way Of Thinking About A Single Pane Of Glass

What if you could create your own view of your data center?

It may sound like a lot to ask but it’s closer to reality than you may think.

As infrastructure gets re-architected for virtual environments and cloud, new approaches to the solutions that manage, replicate, analyze, and alert need to be considered to keep IT in step with the evolving needs of the business. While feature-rich legacy infrastructure management solutions often have long lives, they‘re challenged to deliver all the features and functions every customer wants to run their business.

New IT management solutions need to get pulled together quickly and made available in a single, personalized display. This requires new ways of presenting management information, including new tools and technologies, and new ways of thinking about how information is consumed and shared throughout the organization. Continue reading

Filling The IT Skills Gap

Do you have the right IT skills for the job?

In a previous post about understanding the changing roles in the data center, I discussed the need for a new mindset among data center personnel and some of the new roles emerging for IT professionals  like cloud architects and data center architects. But, even for the most progressive employees and managers, there’s the challenge of keeping current with new innovations and developing the skills to make the most out of the new technologies.

In recent weeks, there has been some newly published information about the IT skills gap and about cloud computing creating new jobs. Fortunately, some of the new education programs available to IT personnel now address the training needs of the physical and virtual data center as well as the new world of cloud computing—and the promise of Big Data analytics. Continue reading

Understanding Changing Roles in the Data Center

Who moved my cheese? In other words, what happened to my job!?

Were you ever just getting comfortable in a job when it changed? Well, look out…it’s happening again.

New IT service models are driving new technologies that span islands of isolation. Storage, network, data base, and application administrators can no longer concern themselves with their own topologies, they must collaborate.

For the most adept and visionary, this phenomena will open up new career opportunities for leaders who can see the big picture and define the future—the cloud architects, data center architects, and virtualization administrators or whatever label you want to assign to the new breed.

For those adverse to change, the need to take a new approach to their jobs will not only be disruptive to their daily routines but also potentially career-limiting or even career-ending depending on attitudes.

It’s a new twist to an old story that gets told time and time again. Continue reading