Your Choice: Cloud Technician or Digital Transformer

Cloud Computing Price-Performance Could Vary By 1000%!

By G C Network | July 14, 2015

by Kevin L. Jackson Yes, you read that right. The price/performance of your cloud computing infrastructure could vary as much as 1000 percent depending on time and location. High levels of…

E-book: Educate Yourself With Dell Insight Partner Views on Cybersecurity

By G C Network | July 10, 2015

Data security breaches and hacker attacks on private businesses, health organizations and government agencies in the U.S. have grabbed headlines with increasing frequency, it seems. There is zero doubt about…

IEEE Cloud Computing Magazine Focuses On GovCloud

By G C Network | July 7, 2015

Today I am especially proud and honored to publicly announce my appointment to the IEEE Cloud Computing Magazine Editorial Board!  I am truly appreciative to Dr. Alan Sill and Dr.…

Is Social Media Right For Your Small Business?

By G C Network | June 30, 2015

Everyone from pre-teens to granddads, does social media today. With Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and many newer ways to stay in the know popping up every day, picking the right platform…

Rob Davies, ViON SVP, Talks about Government Cloud Computing

By G C Network | June 23, 2015

ViON solves complex enterprise problems by combining passion and agility to deliver the most effective, innovative solutions because commitment to mission success is in their DNA. One of the ways…

New Approaches for New Big Data Insights

By G C Network | June 15, 2015

by Melvin Greer Business Intelligence has matured as a core competency necessary to sustain competitive advantage. Organizations of every size and industry are generating valuable data with each interaction, and…

How to Put Public Sector Data Migration Hassles on the Road to Extinction

By G C Network | June 12, 2015

With careful planning and the right technology, Federal, State and Local Government IT Leaders can overcome fears of data migrations, breaking free from archaic procedures to lead the pack  By…

Would you build your house from a Visio diagram?

By G C Network | June 8, 2015

Would you even hire an architect that highlighted hand drawn diagrams and spreadsheets as their design tools of choice? Of course you wouldn’t. Not using computing aided design (CAD) as…

Industry leaders set cloud computing security benchmarks

By G C Network | May 28, 2015

Security has long been the No. 1 cloud computing business concern. Although the apprehension is absolutely valid, cloud computing business decision and strategies are all too often driven by the…

The Science and Art of Business Leadership

By G C Network | May 27, 2015

Business leadership is both science and art. The scientific aspects revolve around finance, organization, products and service. Artistic aspects include relationships, market trajectories and business strategies. While many focus on…

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. Autoscalingwhere 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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