How do I keep my job and benefit from public cloud?

There is lots of thinking going on around how the cloud will change our lives. Some of the things done by IT professional today will be handled by the cloud in the coming years. So what can IT professionals do now so that they can be relevant to the business in the future? There are specific areas where local expertise will still matter. Here is a list:

· Business knowledge: Organizations moving to the cloud would have more time focusing on business related issues. Successful IT pro will be more business oriented and less deep technical in nature. For example instead of focusing on how/when they will be moving mailboxes between sites, they will need to focus on compliance and policy related issues regarding messaging. Once these are set, they will be able to map the required settings for the messaging system either on premises or in the cloud.

· Security: When organizations start moving some of their services to the cloud, there will be a period where some of the services will be provided by the cloud provider and some will be provided in house. It will be very important to provide secure communications between the services and clients. So edge security and network security will be a premium in skills requirements inside organizations. For example organizations would want different security measures accessing their own applications in the cloud versus any other parts of the World Wide Web. Compliance will mandate different security measures and network security will be a very important focus of IT departments.

· Identity Management: When organizations shift on the Infrastructure Optimization model (more information on this is here) identity lifecycle management will be more important. They will need to define more policies around how identities are managed and secured. IT professionals will need to map how identities will use different resources according to given policies and plan their authorization. For example policy will mandate new-hire needs to have an e-mail account. IT pro’s will need to plan which security groups the new-hire should be a part of and what e-mail alias will be used for him/her. Then the actual provisioning can be done through on premise identity management solutions such as Forefront Identity Manager or cloud services.

Organizations will be keeping some of their services in house for various reasons and those areas will still be areas where IT professionals will be needed. These will be vary among the different industries but IT professionals will still be an important part of the organizations for the foreseeable future.