10 Skills IT Pros Need for Cloud Computing

IT professionals have to work constantly to ensure that their skills are up to date. Today, IT pros must guarantee that their cloud-focused skills are resume-ready. And just what are those skills? According to a Forbes.com blog post by contributor Joe McKendrick, there are eight key skills. To those, I add two more.

1. Business and financial skills

The intersection of business and technology is always an overarching concern, but it is especially so when it comes to cloud-based computing.

2. Technical skills

With the cloud, organizations can streamline their IT resources, offloading much of day-to-day systems and application management. But that doesn’t mean IT abdicates all responsibility. There’s a need for language skills to build applications that can run quickly on the Internet.

3. Enterprise architecture and business needs analysis

Cloud computing requires that IT pros cross disciplines, especially where service-oriented architecture comes into play.

4. Project management skills

Organizations must not let the flexibility of the cloud lead to missed deadlines or amorphous goals. That could negate the cloud cost advantage.

5. Contract and vendor negotiation skills

To deal with service-level agreements—and the problems involved when those SLAs are breached—IT pros need experience with contract and vendor negotiations.

6. Security and compliance

IT professionals dealing with the cloud must have a firm grasp of security protocols and the regulatory mandates related to their industries, both within and without the United States.

7. Data integration and analysis skills

IT pros may not be data scientists, but to take advantage of big data, they do need to help data scientists hook up big data, internal ERP, data warehouse and other data systems, and work with the business side to make effective use of big data.

8. Mobile app development and management

Organizations need to think about what kind of mobile experience they are offering to customers via the cloud and how they would like to improve that down the line.
As enterprise cloud computing evolves, it is important to add two more skills to the list:

9. Knowledge of open hybrid clouds

IT is not homogeneous, and neither should your cloud computing model be. IT pros need to understand how to build and extend their companies’ cloud computing infrastructure in a way that is open.

10. Understanding of OpenStack

In order to build the kind of flexible, secure, interoperable cloud infrastructure mentioned above, IT pros must have a strong understanding of the technology required to make it so. OpenStack is a key component. OpenStack, a collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists, comprises a series of projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.