The concept of cloud computing is one we are hearing about with increasing regularity in the IT industry. Once the preserve of multinational companies with the resources to build their own data centres and therefore develop their own private clouds, the growth in collocation/24*7*365 hosting facilities has allowed smaller companies with tighter budgets to take advantage of on-demand network services, servers, storage and applications that they would previously not have had the facilities or technical staff to build and maintain in-house. Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings free companies from the need to operate and maintain expensive IT infrastructures onsite. The opportunity to house large amounts of data, applications and services in public or private clouds, offsite, enables companies to reduce costs, increase or decrease scale depending on demand, and reduce maintenance and IT expenditure, as well as 24/7 support. Rapid deployment of new technologies or services and the benefit of external vendor expertise are also significant advantages to SMEs. Companies have the choice of what services and functions they wish to outsource or host in public clouds (accessible to anyone) and which ones, often due to security/information protection reasons, they want to retain on secure servers in-house or in secure private clouds. 

When a company aims to place some of their systems in a private/public cloud in-house the first step is the virtualization of their servers, storage and network. Often the experience needed for such an enterprise will not be found with in-house IT personnel in most SMEs and a company will often procure the services of consultancies to provide such migrations and technology. Strong knowledge of products such as VMWare and V-Sphere, Hyper-V and ESx/ESXi with qualifications such VMWare certified professional (VCP) are becoming highly desirable in the IT market and many consultants providing virtualization services need such qualifications as a prerequisite.

What we are seeing at Cpl, from our clients, is that the skills that are increasingly in demand, once the systems and the cloud is in place, are usually a high level of monitoring skills (for example experience with Nagios, Cacti and other such software), the ability to understand traffic and network management and the ability to troubleshoot applications and software platform issues. At Cpl we are continually recruiting for data centre engineers and technicians. Prospective candidates for these roles should be able to demonstrate a high level of knowledge of platforms such as Linux as well as monitoring, networking skills (TCP/IP, UDP, BGP and EIGRP) and strong scripting skills at the command line level and also with languages such as Perl. We are likely to see an increase in the need for professionals certified in virtualization technologies, Linux and networking products, e.g. Cisco, as more SMEs seek to take advantage of cloud computing.

If you would like to discuss opportunities in the solutions architecture, virtualization or data centre engineering space please call Tom Leonard at Cpl on 01 614 6146 or email tom.leonard@cpl.ie