IT professionals, we know the drill. Every now and then a new technology or a new paradigm comes our way. Cloud being one of them. They all want to alter all our lives for good. Some enforce adoption, other allow for a smooth transition. But often enough these shift are disruptive in nature. Sometime they are evolutionary. Cloud computing is both. The good news, we IT pros can look behind the curtain and see the opportunity. And we know we have the skills today to be successful.
For the sake of this post, let’s assume we all know and agree on what cloud computing is. BTW, there’s a great definition of cloud computing by the NIST. Take a look if you haven’t already.
What I hope IT professionals get from this short post:
- Confidence that current skills is all required to discover the opportunities of cloud computing
- The cloud is not meant to make you or your job redundant, it is meant to help you and the business you support grow.
- The cloud is the next step in the evolution of computing and you want to be part of it (and be it just for you to be home earlier)
Skills
The benefits of cloud computing and cloud based solutions from Microsoft in particular (disclosure: I lead an IT pro evangelism team at Microsoft) are obvious and plenty. Highlighting the most overlooked and obvious one: Your current skills.
This morning I read an article claiming “New IT skills will be required as cloud computing takes off.” Thankfully that is true. Don’t we all want to learn and keep our skillset up to date, always looking for opportunities to improve? While the author of the before mentioned article is generally right, reading it I had the feeling he describes cloud computing as only disruptive. I disagree with that.
Discovery and Evolution
One aspect of “the cloud” is disruptive in the sense that it enables scenarios like instant access to resources and virtually limitless scalability for any company or business of any size and flavor, without huge upfront investment. But it is also part of the evolution of computing and IT infrastructure. Let’s be more specific.
We spend a lot of time at Microsoft thinking about how we can continue introducing innovations in computing without disrupting your daily business, always keeping the current skills of our customers in mind. No different with Office 365 and Windows Azure or our solutions in Private Cloud.
With our clouds (forgive this nebulous term) you can put your current skills to work immediately. There is no steep learning curve, no new tools. You are good to go.
Regardless if you are the IT guy for your 10 people business or you work for a larger organization’s IT department, you can use your current skills to enable the benefits of the cloud for your company. Don’t let anyone tell you different! Many of the Microsoft tools you work with on a day to day basis are also available to manage solutions that span your local environment and the cloud. Other products, currently not supporting local and cloud based scenarios, are under development and will extend their reach into the cloud soon. There will be sleuth of new tools coming your way too. They all will use concepts you are familiar with and help you help your teams, companies and enterprises to be more successful.
Bring your proven tricks, learn some new
There is no doubt the cloud is not just more of the same old stuff. There’s a whole new world out there. But you already have the skills to take advantage of most of the new
“…abilities”. Start using of some of the new features and do what you have always done best – learn the new tricks while you’re doing the great job you do since you started your career.
At your own pace you will learn additional aspects of cloud computing. Getting more air cover so to speak. To help you, many teams at Microsoft started putting together resources aiming at helping you with your discovery and the evolution to the cloud.
One of the best places to start is the Microsoft Virtual Academy.
The Microsoft Virtual Academy or MVA (we love acronyms you know) is a new online portal help you to improve your technical IT skill set and help advance your career with a free, easy to access training portal. You learn at your own pace, focusing on Microsoft cloud related technologies. To make things fun we added a recognition system. You can gain points and get recognition. As of today we have over 15,000 students registered. This portal will be growing together with you. We constantly expand the MVA with new courses.
The academy highly depends on your feedback and input. We want to add more courses based on your requests. Please take a few lessons and give feedback.
Cloudy and rain in Seattle.
