Cloud - A valuable step forward in IT

Cloud – A valuable step forward in IT

Posted by wp-admin on January 17, 2012 in Blog, Cloud, Featured No comments

Sure we know all about the cloud – or do we.

Technology has moved at an unbelievable pace over the past few years. The days of having the standard windows/UNIX, storage, network engineers, while still valuable may be numbered. No longer can you just rely on this to get by, achieve company goals and maintain system stability while still trying to deliver the next big project. CIO’s etc are now looking at alternative methods of delivering services and more importantly value back to the business.

This is where the cloud makes perfect sense and can deliver significant savings, value add and also allow the business to self-serve when it comes to application provisioning.

Some of the new areas that need to be considered:

Virtualisation, Management
Security, Compliance
Provisioning, Monitoring
Protecting, Performance

And some of the roles associated with the above list:

Datacentre Manager
Security Specialist
Software Architect
Provisioning Manager
Change Manager

As more organisations move towards an ‘IT as a service’ model you need to consider the different solutions available

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), a flexible ways to create, use and manage virtual machines.
Platform as a service (PaaS), higher-level solution beyond virtual machines and looks at applications
Software as a service (SaaS), purchase software on demand from the clouds and consume internally

And then look at the type of cloud that fits your requirements

Private Cloud, On premise in the company datacentre and dedicated to the organisation.
Hosted Private Cloud, Hosted externally but dedicated to an individual organisation
Public Cloud, A pool of resources or applications, shared with other organisations, billed on a consumption basis

As stated at the start of this post the days of having dedicated resources for storage etc… may be numbered. By adopting cloud based computing you can leverage off all the automation built into these new technologies. If you are to look at the major vendors, most if not all will have decent plugins that can take the hard work out of storage provisioning, networking, even security and let the IT guy get on with his job of delivering value to the business.

The next issue to address is certification. Cloud adoption has moved at an astronomical pace so what better time to dust off the brain and get certified. Cloud is not going away so why not become an expert in your field. There are many different courses and certificates available and this list and degree of detail is only going to get bigger as time goes by. A couple worth mentioning are:

CIT / EMC - Masters degree in Cloud Computing

The MSc Degree and BSc (Hons) Degree in cloud computing “aim to provide graduates with the advanced conceptual understanding, detailed factual knowledge, and specialist technical skills required for successfully delivering Cloud Computing”

VMware
VCP - VMware Certified Professional

VCAP/DCA - VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Datacenter Administration

VCAP/DCD - VMware Certified Advanced Professional on vSphere 4 – Datacenter Design

VCDX - VMware Certified Design Expert

IBM

IBM Certified Solution Architect

IBM Certified Solution Advisor

CloudSchool

Certified Cloud Professional

Certified Cloud Technology Professional

Certified Cloud Architect

Certified Cloud Security Specialist