As the IT silos come down, tech pros need to beef up their skills to stay relevant and maximise the business benefits of cloud computing, virtualisation, unified networking and big data. This according to Cisco and EMC, which have teamed to offer training targeted at tech’s hottest data centre disciplines.
New job roles are emerging as companies adopt converged infrastructures, shift to cloud architectures, and wrangle with massive data stores, and enterprises need to prepare the IT workforce to handle their new roles, the vendors said.
“There’s some confusion around cloud, cloud-based services, and how to leverage the cloud as part of an overall organisational transformation,” said Anthony Bryant, director of learning services at Learning@Cisco.
“How do you move from classical data centres to virtual data centres to cloud-based data centre? There’s also confusion around how to transform the technical talent within this arena,” he added.
Unveiled this week, the training initiative from Cisco and EMC also includes resources from VMware. Their joint education bundles provide courseware and certifications related to cloud architecture, virtualisation, storage, data centre networking and data science.
The bundles are organised around specific disciplines and job roles, including cloud architect, systems administrator, backup and recovery, data centre network design and data scientist.
“The lines between the traditional silos, or pillars, in IT are starting to blur” in today’s IT-as-a-service, cloud-based data centre environments. They have to, because one group or one function making a decision impacts everybody else,” said Alok Shrivastava, senior director of education services at EMC.
“You might be a system admin or DBA or network admin, and you need to understand what’s going on across the different technology areas in the data centre,” he added.
In the Cisco/EMC/VMware training model, there’s a path associated with each discipline that prescribes the required courses to become proficient. For instance, the systems administrator path requires these courses: Cloud Infrastructure and Services, VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage, and Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Implementation (DCUCI).
Someone aspiring to be a data centre network architect could follow a learning path that includes these courses: EMC Cloud Infrastructure and Services, Cisco Data Center Unified Fabric (DCUFD), and Configuring Cisco Nexus Data Center (CCNDC).
IT pros can opt to purchase courses by the bundle or individually. The training is delivered via instructor-led courses, instructor-led video training, or, in certain cases, on-site instruction at a customer premises.
From the perspective of a CIO of a 1,000-person IT organisation, “the success of cloud transformation depends on the team. Beyond the technologies, unless the team has bought into it and has developed new skill sets, the project could very well fail. It becomes extremely critical for CIOs to transform the workforce,” Shrivastava said.
