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If you’ve been around IT people in recent months, you may have heard the unease in nearly all of the discussions regarding career progress. Stay on core infrastructures or take a complete turnaround to the cloud? It’s not a technical discussion anymore — it’s a Career choice that can affect the next 10 years of your career. But at Net2Aspire, best staffing agency in USA, we speak to learners every day that grapple with this very question, so let’s be honest – let’s not beat around the bush or fill our conversation with doom and gloom.
What we all studied about in school for traditional IT infrastructure. Physical servers running away in a locked room, network switches, local storage arrays, and an engineer with the knowledge of all the cabling and all the configurations. It’s tangible. You can go to the data center, and literally touch the hardware that your company dumps its apps on. The world is full of complicated, detailed and very specific knowledge, such as with respect to your server, structured cabling, hardware support troubleshooting and network design.
Cloud computing turns all that on its head, however. This is the model in which organizations pay-for-use computing power, storage and services from a provider, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, rather than owning and maintaining physical machines themselves. There is no touch of anything. All through Dashboards, APIs and Code. Flexible, scalable and for many businesses, much less expensive than running an in-house data center.
Today, both worlds continue to exist side by side, and so does this Career conversation!
By no means will traditional infrastructure work disappear. Compliance mandates or legacy systems at banks, government agencies, healthcare providers and manufacturers may pose limitations on moving to the cloud overnight, if ever. These organizations are still in need of skilled personnel to maintain their servers, networks and critical systems.
While not everyone is the tech type who enjoys tackling physical infrastructure challenges or the one who always knows how to fix the server room when it’s two degrees hotter, traditional IT still has a career. While the job titles may change, many of the roles of, for example, a network administrator, systems engineer or data center technician are not disappearing from the landscape, but are transforming and may even be undergoing a shift toward cloud jobs.
The downside? Purely traditional roles have not experienced strong growth. There are not many companies constructing new data centers and lots of companies are taking steps to reduce their on-premise footprint. So, the roof is dropping on the side of traditional jobs, although the floor is holding up for the time being.
Most of the industry’s energy and hiring needs, however, have moved to cloud computing. Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, migrating to the cloud is an option for reducing costs, expanding quickly and creating new features and services even more rapidly. This change has engendered a huge demand for cloud architects, DevOps engineers, cloud security professionals and site reliability engineers.
The appeal of cloud careers is that there are many possibilities out there. It’s not limited to one type of employer or industry. Today, the cloud demands talent from everything from ecommerce businesses, fintech startups, streaming service companies and even traditional manufacturers. Paying is competitive, remote working is widespread and skills can be transferred more across borders and industry than traditionally with infrastructure skills.
However, the Cloud roles have their own set of challenges. Technology is advancing quickly. The information you’ve gained today may be updated in 18 months with the introduction of new services and as new best practices emerge. It’s more of an environment where certifications are important and there’s no going back, it’s part of the job.
It is not an either/or situation; it is more a matter of considering the skills demanded by each. A traditional IT relies mainly on hardware knowledge and operating systems/Networking protocols and troubleshooting. Automation, scripting, containerization (such as Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure as code and knowledge of distributed security are the bases of cloud computing.
The good news is that there are a lot of skills that overlap and are foundational throughout. Working with networking is useful either when you are setting up a virtual private cloud or configuring a physical switch. Understanding how operating systems work behind the scenes is a good thing for a cloud engineer, not a bad thing. Instead, the best approach for a lot of professionals isn’t to pick one option and go the other direction — it’s to establish a solid traditional base and add cloud competencies onto that.
In the cloud versus traditional debate, something about this one always gets overlooked: Most in-the-wild companies don’t operate entirely in the cloud or entirely in the traditional way. They’re hybrid. Customer-facing applications are frequently implemented in the cloud platform for their scalability, while sensitive data remains in the on-premise infrastructure for compliance reasons. This hybrid reality creates the necessity of professionals who know both worlds who are typically most valuable people in the room.
You will be the conduit that enables organizations to seamlessly move to the cloud, solve issues operating across environments, and better leverage infrastructure to meet business needs. That flexibility is a burgeoning duo that is in growing demand these days.
Which way should you go then? This is determined by your place and your excitement. In general, for those who are just starting out, it’s typically easier to move into cloud computing sooner, because of hiring trends and salary growth. But you don’t have to give up on your traditional infrastructure skills if you already have them: think about complementing them with cloud certifications and hybrid-environment skills.
At Net2Aspire, best staffing agency in USA, we have seen students from both backgrounds do well in school if they have remained curious and never allowed themselves to be pigeon-holed. But the professionals who are doing well right now are not the ones who gambled all their money on the cloud nor did they stick with the traditional ones. That is the ones that kept learning and adapting to the changing times and developed skill sets that could keep up with the times.
The future of IT careers isn’t one of cloud vs traditional. It is also about knowing your stuff so well that you cannot be replaced anywhere in the industry, regardless of the direction of the industry.
Conventional IT jobs involve the physical management of hardware such as storage, network switches and servers and cloud-based computing jobs deal with virtual resources such as on-demand servers from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Although skills vary, there are many similarities such as networking and system administration.
A strong choice for young professionals, cloud is currently in higher demand than other hiring options and is seeing quicker salary growth. However, in many sectors, such as finance, healthcare and government, conventional IT jobs are still crucial due to compliance standards and legacy systems, which ensure the continued role of physical infrastructure.
Yes, in most cases. The old role of infrastructure is growing, but it’s becoming more cloud-focused. Having cloud certifications or experience in a hybrid-environment adds to the overall value of a traditional IT background and makes people more secure and more likely to advance in their careers.
Automation and scripting skills, container-related tools such as Docker and Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code and basic cloud security skills are all important. Good networking and operating systems knowledge are also beneficial as many of the traditional IT concepts remain relevant in cloud environments.
No, there are no jobs in traditional IT that are going away, but the growth rate has reduced. There are many organizations that still use on-premise infrastructure for compliance or legacy reasons, so roles such as network administrator and systems engineer still exist, but they are transitioning to add more responsibilities for the cloud.
Cloud certifications like AWS Solutions or AWS DevOps, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud certifications are good for cloud positions and certifications such as CompTIA Network+ or CCNA are still good for traditional infrastructure knowledge. The ideal combination of certifications is both to accompany a professional looking for hybrid IT positions.