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The cloud computing market continues to expand at a phenomenal rate. According to a recent report from IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow 19.4% annually through to 2019. Six times the rate of overall IT spend growth, this will double the current spend from $70 billion to $141 billion.

As more businesses transition to the cloud this will drive up demand for IT professionals with the skills to make the most of the technology. A market, which according to WANTED Analytics, already offers 18 million jobs worldwide. When considering this transition, a report from BT suggests security remains the number one concern for businesses looking to implement cloud technology. Therefore, IT professionals with cloud security skills will be more in-demand than most.

To help you take advantage of this growing opportunity, take a look at this list of the top five in-demand cloud security skills.

Compliance

The instant a business makes use of a cloud storage or backup service, compliance becomes an issue. Moving data from internal to external storage requires that business to closely examine how that data is kept to ensure they remain compliant with laws and industry regulations.

Understanding data types you can and can’t move to the cloud, asking the right questions of providers and ensuring correct terms are written into service level agreements (SLAs) are all critical areas in maintaining a business’s cloud compliance. Professionals who can demonstrate these skills within these areas will be in huge demand, crucial to any organisation using cloud storage services. Getting on the wrong side of cloud compliance can cost organisations $millions in fines, not to mention the reputational damage it can cause.

Ethical hacking

One of the more exciting skills on the list is that of ethical hacking. Businesses are increasingly on the lookout for professionals with ethical hacking skills as they look to test the security of their private, public and hybrid cloud deployments.

These ethical hackers combine a series of tools, hacking and penetration techniques in order to search for weaknesses in the businesses systems. The Certified Ethical Hacker course from EC-Council is a great way to develop these skills, with new modules dedicated to cloud computing.

Platform specific knowledge

When it comes to selecting a cloud platform, businesses actively seeking professionals who can demonstrate in-depth knowledge of the leading providers. This platform specific knowledge is hugely important when it comes to security.

These professionals help the business choose the platform, understanding how cloud service providers implement security. This can include knowledge of how each provider enforces physical security of its infrastructure and facilities through to the inbuilt security features that can be implemented once using a platform.

For leading providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, there are a range of cloud courses available to help develop this platform specific knowledge.

Communication

Interestingly, among the most in-demand cloud security skills is one entirely unrelated to the technologies themselves, communication. Both cloud and security combined include complex technological concepts and jargon that require explanation. The ability to be able to communicate these concepts and requirements to management and non-technical staff is a critical part of ensuring cloud security is correctly implemented in an organisation.

In fact, the (ISC)² Global Information Security Workforce Study places communication as the most important skill in contributing to being a successful information security professional. Amazingly, 90% of the 14,000 respondents ranked it as the number one.

Encryption

TalkTalk’s recent data breach cost the company £60m. The cause, cyber attackers intercepting unencrypted data packages.

Encryption remains one of the most effective ways to achieve data security. With the volume of data now being transmitted from businesses to the cloud, professionals who can create complex encryption algorithms whilst also understanding the different cloud encryption services on offer will continue to be a valuable and sought after asset.

Conclusion

These are some of the hottest security skills demanded of the modern cloud professional. Developing your skills in just one of these areas will open the door to new and exciting opportunities in 2016 and beyond. Why not start today?

Read more: The top five in-demand cloud skills for 2016

The notion of customer journeys, of course, are central to the digital marketer’s playbook. Clearly, enterprises should focus their digital efforts on such journeys, as they represent customer interactions over time. But making customer journeys the centerpiece of the enterprise architecture, however, leaves more questions than answers.

The challenge arises when EAs consider the context of the customer journey in the overall architecture as well as the architectural elements that make up each customer journey. After all, dividing up the world into familiar layers like process, data, and technology is relatively straightforward. There are overlaps and ambiguities at the edges to be sure, but everyone approaches such layers with a relatively common understanding of the overall scope of each layer and what belongs within each one.

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Currently, the preferred method of data protection of cloud giants, such as Google, is to replicate the data across different locations (i.e., data centers), rather than performing a true back up. This is done because a true back up seems logistically too complicated given the amount of data these giants store. These companies have turned to replicated data because, the assumed risk of all replications crashing simultaneously are extremely slim. This risk assumption may be accurate but it does not take into account unintentional data destruction.

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Data persistence has a way of sneaking up on developers. You start out with a simple, straightforward database that can functionally hold the data you’re working with and the data you need to work with later. But as your needs change, you start to modify it here and there, until it becomes a brittle tangle of tables and keys and indexes. You need something more dynamic, but you need to retain the ability to retrieve your persistent data. Now, you’re miles from where you started, and staring down the possibility of having to adopt a whole new system. That persistent data is fundamental to nearly any operation that utilizes database management systems (DBMS), but while the growth of dynamic data has led to sophisticated and reliable new relational management systems, real-world techniques for optimal data storage and retrieval have sometimes been lost in the shuffle. With that in mind, we’ve put together a new edition of our comprehensive DZone Guide to Data Persistence.

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In the digital arena, it’s impossible to avoid Dion Hinchcliffe. Perhaps you’ve seen one of his numerous keynotes or joined one of his workshops. Maybe you’ve read one of his books, Web 2.0 Architectures (with coauthors James Governor and Duane Nickull) or Social Business By Design (Peter Kim, coauthor). Or possibly you’ve spotted one of his stream of articles over the years, for ZDNet, ebizQ, and many others.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Stratoscale, the software company developing the next generation data center operating system, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Stratoscale is revolutionizing the data center with a zero-to-cloud-in-minutes solution. With Stratoscale’s hardware-agnostic, Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) solution to store everything, run anything and scale everywhere, IT is empowered to take control of their data centers. Stratoscale is offering a Hyperconverged cloud supporting OpenStack out of the box.

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Enterprises are impatient to translate their investments in cloud apps and the insight they provide into business outcomes and solid results today.

The following insights are based on a series of discussions with C-level executives and revenue team leaders across several industries regarding their need for an Intelligent Cloud:

• In the enterprise, the cloud versus on-premise war is over, and the cloud has won. Nearly all are embracing a hybrid cloud strategy to break down the barriers that held them back from accomplishing more.

• None of the C-level executives I’ve spoken with recently are satisfied with just measuring cloud adoption. All are saying the want to measure business outcomes and gain greater insights into how they can better manage revenue and sales cycles.

• Gaining access to every available legacy and third party system using hybrid cloud strategies is the new normal. Having data that provides enterprise-wide visibility gives enterprises greater control over every aspect of their selling and revenue management processes. And when that’s accomplished, the insights gained from the Intelligent Cloud can quickly be turned into results.

Welcome to the era of the intelligent cloud

The more enterprises seek out insights to drive greater business outcomes, the more it becomes evident the era of the Intelligent Cloud has arrived. C-level execs are looking to scale beyond descriptive analytics that defines past performance patterns.  What many are after is an entirely new level of insights that are prescriptive and cognitive. Getting greater insight that leads to more favourable business outcomes is what the Intelligent Cloud is all about. The following Intelligent Cloud Maturity Model summarises the maturity levels of enterprises attempting to gain greater insights and drive more profitable business outcomes.

Why the intelligent cloud now?  

Line-of-business leaders across all industries want more from their cloud apps than they are getting today. They want the ability to gain greater insights with prescriptive and cognitive analytics. They’re also asking for new apps that give them the flexibility of changing selling behaviors quickly.  In short, everyone wants to get to the orchestration layer of the maturity model, and many are stuck staring into a figurative rearview mirror, using just descriptive data to plan future strategies.  The future of enterprise cloud computing is all about being able to deliver prescriptive and cognitive intelligence.
Consider the following takeaways:

• By 2018, 40% of B2B digital commerce sites will use price optimization algorithms and configure/ price/quote (CPQ) tools to dynamically calculate and deliver product pricing. (Source: Gartner Inc., Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, March 9, 2016)

• By 2018, Cloud Becomes a Preferred Delivery Mechanism for Analytics (Source: IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2016 Predictions — Mastering the Raw Material of Digital Transformation, Nov. 2015)

• By 2017, 50% of large B2B organizations will invest in predictive analytics solutions for prospect qualification, opportunity automation, forecasting automation or renewal management. (Source: Gartner, Evaluate Emerging Sales Performance Management Technologies to Improve Sales Execution, September 15, 2015)

• 9 out of 10 enterprise leaders believe analytics is essential or very important to their overall business strategies and operational outcomes.Also, 84% of high performers are projecting that the importance of analytics will increase substantially or somewhat in the next two years.  Source: Salesforce Research Defines The 2015 State Of Analytics. November 1, 2015. 

• 81% of enterprises are relying on analytics to improve their understanding of customers and their purchasing process (Source: 81% of Enterprises Are Relying On Analytics To Gain Greater Customer Insights, Forbes, July 26, 2015).

Who is delivering the intelligent cloud today?

Just how far advanced the era of the Intelligent Cloud is became apparent during the Microsoft Build Developer Conference last week in San Francisco.  A fascinating area discussed was Microsoft Cognitive Services and their implications on the Cortana Intelligence Suite. Microsoft is offering a test drive of Cognitive Services here. Combining Cognitive Services and the Cortana Intelligence Suite, Microsoft has created a framework for delivering the Intelligent Cloud. The graphic below shows the Cortana Analytics Suite.

Apttus, a leader in Quote-to-Cash automation, cloud-based enterprise software is announcing the Apttus Intelligent Cloud today. The Apttus Intelligent Cloud drives desired behaviours from everyone on the revenue team and provides prescriptive information to company decision makers to significantly enhance Apttus’ category-defining Quote-to-Cash applications, maximising revenue for Apttus customers. The Apttus Intelligent Cloud includes the full Apttus Quote-to-Cash Suite, Incentives Suite, and Intelligence Suite. The graphic below defines the Apttus Intelligent Cloud.  In the interest of full disclosure, I am an employee of Apttus.