As companies begin to test the waters with cloud computing, experts say that IT workers need to work on acquiring cloud-related skills. “There’s a great benefit today in that there are so many [training] resources available,” says Bernard Golden, CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus. “There are a lot of online resources, and a lot of these products you can use for free or they’re dirt cheap. You have a real opportunity to get hands-on experience with a low barrier to entry.”
While some IT staffers worry that the transition cloud computing will leave them without a job, that scenario is not very likely for application developers. In fact, HyperStratus says that the cloud will result in a “golden age” for developers, with more job openings than ever before. However, to take advantage of those opportunities, developers will need to get ready by learning new APIs, new frameworks like Cloud Foundry or PHP Fog, the ins and outs of building elastic and scalable applications and how to work with non-relational databases.
