Your Choice: Cloud Technician or Digital Transformer

Packing My Bags For Prague and Dimension Data #Perspectives2015

By G C Network | May 15, 2015

Prague is a beautiful city!  My last time was in June 2010 when Jeremy Geelan invited me to speak at CloudExpo Europe (see my blog post and video from that…

SAP/HANA Does Big Data for National Security

By G C Network | May 13, 2015

Carmen Krueger, SAP NS2 SVP & GM While SAP is globally renowned as a provider of enterprise management software, the name is hardly ever associated with the spooky world of…

Be future ready: Selling to millennials and a marketplace of one

By G C Network | May 12, 2015

There is almost a deafening discussion going on about the self-centeredness of today’s young adults. Weather you call them Generation Y, millennials or twenty-somethings, the general refrain seems to be…

Surviving an Environment of IT Change

By G C Network | May 8, 2015

  “The Federal government today is in the midst of a revolution. The revolution is challenging the norms of government by introducing new ways of serving the people. New models…

OmniTI and GovCloud Join Forces to Provide Cloud-based Services

By G C Network | May 5, 2015

FULTON, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–OmniTI, a leading provider of web infrastructures and applications for companies that require scalable, high-performance, mission critical solutions, today announced that it has partnered with GovCloud Network, LLC…

Cloud microservices make their play

By G C Network | April 29, 2015

 by Kevin L. Jackson Cloud computing seems destined to be the way enterprises will use information technology. The drastic cost reductions and impressive operational improvements make the transition an unstoppable trend.…

Tweeps Are People Too!!

By G C Network | April 25, 2015

I woke up this morning to the devastating news about the earthquake in Nepal. Sitting here in California  that destruction is literally on the other side of the world but…

The CISO role in cybersecurity: Solo or team sport?

By G C Network | April 14, 2015

The average length of time in the commercial sector between a network security breach and when the detection of that breach is more than 240 days, according to Gregory Touhill, deputy…

Setting standards for IoT can capitalize on future growth

By G C Network | March 30, 2015

by Melvin Greer Managing Director Greer Institute for Leadership and Innovation The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) appears to be unquestioned. Advances in wearables and sensors are strategic to…

Women in tech: Meet the trailblazers of STEM equality

By G C Network | March 19, 2015

By Sandra K. Johnson CEO, SKJ Visioneering, LLC   Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professionals are drivers of innovation,creativity and invention. STEM disciplines are significant drivers of economies worldwide,…

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.)

Cloud Musings

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