Skills for the Cloud IT Professional
I have been thinking lately how much of the work IT Pros needed to do as part of their job 5 years ago is rapidly going the way the buggy whip maker (obscure movie reference). IT professionals need to evolve and the following is the list of skills and areas of focus that I believe will serve the modern professional.
- Embrace the disruption. Disruption in IT is a constant and embracing it and evolving is what is required.
- Know your favorite cloud providers and how to manage resources in them.
- Scripting and Automation.
- Security
- Networking Configuration. See security above.
- Performance Testing. Some vendors like SAP provide guidelines for performance for their apps but many will require testing to understand how to optimize performance.
- Get comfortable with Analytics and Data Visualization.
- Learn to start calling everything Microservices (a bit of humor).
- Be prepared for continuous learning to keep up with cloud paced evolution.
- Get comfortable talking to the business.
- Embrace simplification.
- Abandon built here thinking unless you are providing a differentiated business service.
- Get comfortable with service levels.
- Get comfortable with losing some visibility and control in favor of service levels.
This is a start. Let me know if I have missed anything..
You've articulated the tacit, in way that certainly helps me make sense of where the conversations are going. Implications of many of these - especially #11 simplification and #14 control - is that IT has to help the enterprise deal with functional gaps that will not be filled for several product iterations. What used to be an IT requirement or a functional requirement ends up reclassified as optional, and tabled in favor of a business requirement to move to a shared service. That's a cultural shift that may cause tension. Instead of focusing on the loss of precedence in defining requirements, IT should #15 get good at rapidly adopting services that don't meet traditional IT requirements.
Great list Greg. Numbers 3, 5, and 13 are key! Especially since there are so many gotchas around taking advantage of service levels with all the cloud providers. Number 9 is, of course, situation normal for IT, but the pace of cloud innovation has made it even more important.