Careers in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has created a lot of buzz lately and many companies have started venturing in this domain and providing cloud-based services. Likewise, most companies have also started moving some of their IT operations on the Cloud.

IT professionals over the years have experienced how technologies evolve rapidly and realized the need to keep themselves in sync with the latest to survive in their careers. It is no longer sufficient to know the difference between Windows or Linux-based architecture. As the industry is becoming more service oriented, IT professionals have to learn about the various ways in which services can be delivered to customers. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has already proved a good value proposition for enterprises, they just outsource their application requirement to a third party to manage and provide them with that service. And SaaS is just a pre-cursor to cloud computing.

Cloud Computing is hot! The likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. have already initiated efforts in Cloud Computing and are betting big on its success and eventual adoption. The reason is evident from the benefits that an organization would accrue, like reduced start-up costs and investments, scalability and ability to have flexible and powerful computing platforms with no hassles of maintenance or licensing. Cloud Computing in coming years is going to transform the IT infrastructure space.

However, Cloud Computing is based on a more virtualized environment and there is no resource constraint for an application. An application hosted on Cloud platform should be able to harness the computing power of the resource with no constraints, ie if the requirement of an application increases, the resource allocated will also scale up dynamically.

Also, there shall be providers who will have the Cloud architecture-based infrastructure for providing services and there will consumers, which shall be organizations that will access services provided on the Cloud. Hence, there would be two-faceted impact on career opportunities for IT professionals, whether they are infrastructure engineers, software developers, networking or security experts. The positive impact would be that there are opportunities for them in organizations that plan to provide Cloud-based services.