Your Choice: Cloud Technician or Digital Transformer

The CompTIA Cloud+ certification validates the skills and expertise of IT practitioners in implementing and maintaining cloud technologies.  This is exactly what it takes to become a good cloud technician.  In the past few years, however, the National Cloud Technologists Association (NCTA) has recognized that evolving market demands have changed cloud computing technology  in at least 13 ways:

1.  Variable pricing Cloud service providers charge different prices at different times based on  demand
2. Pre-emptable machines – Providers are offering a lower price for machines that could be shut down and restarted at a later time without aborting the assigned task
3. Shift from hardware to algorithms where the hardware is bundled into the software price
4. Use of reserve instances where the user buys compute power in advance
5. Buying in bulk where pricing is based on aggregated use even if it is sporadic in nature
6. Cloud providers offer shared data sources along with commodity hardware
7. Autoscaling where newer software layers offered by cloud vendors handle infrastructure scaling automatically and billing is done by service request instead of by the machine
8. Graphic processor units have become available for jobs requiring heavy-duty parallel computation
9. Much improved analytics that monitoring the performance of your systems.
10. Significant increase in the number of options available for various business requirements and loads
11. “Bare metal” servers that aren’t virtual.
12. Containers, like Docker, that makes deploying software much easier and faster.  The cloud will therefore spin up a new instance with a container-ready version of the OS at the bottom.
13. A growing proliferation of exotic and specialized options, all offering anything you need with the extra phrase “as a service

This means cloud computing isn’t just about technology.  It is about leading organizations through the Digital Transformation era.  This is why the NCTACloudMASTER® certification was created.

Digital transformation is the profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way. Executives in all industries are using digital advances such as analytics, mobility, social media and smart embedded devices as well as improving their use of traditional technologies such as ERP to change customer relationships, internal processes and value propositions.

Serving as “Digital Transformers”, a NCTA CloudMASTER®:

• Help the organization transforms customer experiences through
• Customer understanding;
• Top-line growth; and
• Customer touch points.
• Optimizes internal processes through
• Process digitization;
• Worker enablement; and
• Performance management.
• Transforms a company’s core functions and activities through
• Digital modifications to the business;
• Creation of new digital businesses; and
• Digital Globalization.

This means that if you want to have an IT career in five years, you must strive to be a Digital Transformer, not just a cloud technician.  Our society is experiencing a fundamental shift in information technology’s overarching mission, with the support-and-maintain mind-set giving way to a more strategic, software-centric vision for IT.  IT staff of the future need the skills of a businessperson to stay current, as their company's software requirements and the options for satisfying them will be deep, varied, and changing quickly.  The IT department five years from now will also need to keep pace with nearly constant change. CloudMASTER® training and certification is comprised of three courses with exams:

• NCTA Cloud Technologies that provide an overview of cloud computing that will help you develop a deep understanding of the models and understand the landscape of technologies used in the cloud and those employed by users of cloud services. You will receive multiple points of view, firsthand experience and a foundation in managing industry leading cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Drupal, Wordpress, Google Docs and Digital Ocean.
• NCTA Cloud Operations that helps you study the management of cloud operations and addresses the application need for compute power, managing CPU scaling, and meeting both structured and unstructured storage requirements. You will learn how to painlessly deploy fairly complex applications that scale across multiple instances in cloud technologies including Windows Azure Chef, Chef Solo, Linux and Windows Tools.
• NCTA Cloud Architecture that includes hands-on experience with OpenShift, OpenStack, VMware, Amazon Web Services, Azure and Rackspace, and provides a framework to assess application performance needs while addressing business requirements of Return on Investment (ROI), Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Groups will complete a cloud assessment of Fortune 100 firms using public information and make presentations to the client.

The more complex and interconnected cloud environments become, the more a general understanding and knowledge of how it all works together will be valued.  IT staff will no longer be the ones responsible for “managing the plumbing”, they'll be the people who are thinking of new ways to monetize, share, and use corporate data for organizational success.

So which future do you want for you and your family?

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

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