In a competitive talent market, such as IT, obtaining a certification is a sure way to verify your expertise, demonstrate your knowledge quickly to others, and ultimately make job hunting a far smoother process. Recruiters look for credentials to back up details provided on an applicant’s CV and many companies request certain types of certification in order for an applicant to even be considered for a role.

According to training provider Global Knowledge, 89% of the global IT industry is certified. It recently published its list of the 15 top paying IT certifications in 2019, showing that employers are focusing on specific areas, in particular, cloud computing, cyber security, networking and project management. In fact, cloud and project management dominated the top five spots.

Global Knowledge 2019 report:

Although the figures provided represent a look at the US market, we can see that Google’s own Cloud Architect certification is now the best qualification to pursue in terms of average salary, closely followed by qualifications in project management and then development roles for AWS.

«The two leading areas are cyber security and cloud computing, followed by virtualisation, network and wireless LANs,» notes Zane Schweer, Global Knowledge’s director of marketing communications. «Up and coming certifications focus on AI, cognitive computing, machine learning, IoT, mobility and end-point management.»

Cloud comes out on top

«Cloud computing is paramount to every aspect of modern business,» explains Deshini Newman, managing director EMEA of non-profit organisations (ISC)2. «It’s reflective of the highly agile and cost-effective way that businesses need to work now, and so skilled professionals need to demonstrate that they are proficient in the same platforms, methodologies and approaches towards development, maintenance, detection and implementation.»

Jisc, a non-profit which specialises in further and higher education technology solutions, has joined many other organisations in adopting a cloud-first approach to IT, and so relies heavily on services like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

«Certified training in either or both of these services is important for a variety of roles,» explains Peter Kent, head of IT governance and communications at Jisc, «either to give the detailed technical know-how to operate them or simply to demonstrate an understanding of how they fit into our infrastructure landscape.»

«Accompanying these, related networking and server certifications such as Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MSCE) are important as many cloud infrastructures still need to work with remaining or hybrid on-premise infrastructures,» he notes.

Security certifications are also high on the most-wanted list, but they are required across a variety of different platforms and disciplines. One of the growth areas (ISC)2 has seen is in cybersecurity certifications in relation to the cloud. «This is something that is reflected by the positioning of the cloud within the Global Knowledge top 15,» Newman points out.

Aside from technical training, ITIL is still considered a key certification as a way of benchmarking an individual’s understanding of the infrastructure and process framework that IT teams have in place.

«But with ITIL v4 just around the corner I’d recommend holding off any training until v4 courses are widely available,» advises Kent.

And it’s not just about the accreditation – it can often also be about the company behind the certification itself. This is part of what makes the most desirable certifications desirable – the credibility and support of the issuing bodies.

The benefits of certification

Global Knowledge’s report highlighted that businesses believe that having certified IT professionals on staff offer a number of benefits – most importantly helping them meet client requirements, close skills gaps and solve technical issues more quickly.

This is great for the company, but what do you gain as an individual? Well, aside from being in higher demand and the ability to perform a job faster, the main answer is a larger paycheque.

«In North America, it’s roughly a 15% increase in salary, while in EMEA its 3%,» says Schweer. «We attribute cost of living and other unique circumstances within each country to the difference,» he notes.

Research by (ISC)2 and recruitment firm Mason Frank International also showed similar results.

«In our latest Salesforce salary survey 39% of respondents indicated that their salary had increased since becoming certified and those holding certifications at the rarer end of the spectrum are more likely to benefit from a pay increase,» says director Andy Mason.

«While the exact amount of money an individual can earn will fluctuate from sector to sector, it is clear that certifications in any sector can and do make a big financial difference,» agrees Newman. «That’s on top of setting individuals apart at the top of their profession.»

Does certification create an ‘opportunity shortage’?

However, not everyone regards certifications as the be-all-and-end-all for recruiting the best possible staff. Some, such as Mango Solutions’ head of data engineering, Mark Sellors, actually believe that it can often ‘lock-out’ certain candidates that might be perfect for a role.

«This can be troubling for a number of reasons,» he says. «In many cases certifications are worked out in an individual’s personal time. This means those with significant responsibilities outside of their existing job may not be in a position to do additional study, and that’s not to mention the cost of some of these certs.»

He adds that using certifications as a bar above which one must reach can also further reduce gender diversity within the IT space, as a past study by Hewlett Packard found that women are much less likely than men to apply for a job if they don’t meet all of the listed entry requirements.

It’s Sellors’ belief that the problem facing many hiring managers is not just a talent one, but rather a one of opportunity.

«They’re not giving great candidates the opportunity to excel in these roles as they’ve latched on to the idea that talent can be proven with a certificate,» explains Sellors. «Certifications can be useful in certain circumstances – for example when trying to prove a certain degree of knowledge during a career switch, or moving from one technical area to another. They’re also a great way to quickly ramp up knowledge when your existing role shifts in a new direction.

«More often than not, however, they prove little beyond the candidate’s ability to cram for an exam. Deep technical knowledge comes from experience and there’s sadly no shortcut for that.»

Creative Agency Network M&C Saatchi is using NetSuite’s ERP system to make better use of data and boost debt collection processes in its London offices.

It now hopes to expand its use of the technology, internationally, according to Michael Saunders, finance director at M&C Saatchi London.

The incumbent was mainframe-based, which generated Excel-based reports that weren’t very enlightening. Now, with NetSuite, it’s much easier to slice and dice data and drill down into transactions quickly and easily, Saunders told Cloud Pro.

“Things now happen in a much more timely way,” he said. “We didn’t have much of an ability to look at things by department or look at what you’ve sold in this month, where your spend is versus last year in this area etc. You can spot trends and things going wrong a lot faster. Once we get more of the forecasting elements done, it will improve our kind of month end process. We should have more accurate forecasting.”

Saunders added: “I ran a selection process and we ended up with 15 potential ERP systems on the list. It was a strategic move to go with NetSuite as it’s very easy to build on it and it’s easy to integrate it with other systems. All the other ones we looked at didn’t have as good a UI and didn’t feel like they had as much money being pumped into them.

“It’s a quite simple, reliable system to use. If you gave it to a kid, they could probably work out how to do certain things quite easily.”

There are more than a dozen entities operating under the M&C Saatchi umbrella in London, with around 800 employees. Globally, the organisation has around 2,000 members of staff.

After a thorough selection process that started in 2016, Saunders and key stakeholders settled upon NetSuite as their ERP system of choice for the UK business. The system went live in January 2018 with a two-week training programme initiated to get employees up and running quickly and easily.

The firm also kept its implementation partner, RSM, on board for the initial few months to help ease any teething problems with the user training side of things.

M&C Saatchi has and is growing around the world, but organically and through acquisition so it still uses a number of different ERP systems depending on location and other needs. Using the UK as a test bed, the plan is to try and rationalise the number of systems in use, even if that still results in multiple ERP instances.

“The first stage of the project was always to focus on the UK as we didn’t want to do too much at once. We’ve been on the same system in the UK for 18 years. Now, we’re starting to look at how it can be more of a platform for the systems we use. We’re integrating our budgeting and forecasting tool, Adaptive Insights, into it, and Sage People. All you have to work out is where your master record for each type of information is going to be held. You can get them all talking to each other quite quickly,” Saunders added.

“To bring in a new office of region is not a new implementation. I could almost set up a new subsidiary on my phone right now… Hopefully, that is where we will also see value – we won’t need a professional services team to do a new country. There are economies of scale as you bring more data and more people onto it.”

Serverless cloud. It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? How can cloud computing be serverless? All that deployed code, all that accumulated data being crunched, examined and interpreted. Surely servers are needed for these tasks?

Well, as it happens, ‘serverless cloud’ is a poor marketing term, as nothing runs in this day and age without some form of compute engine – it’s false advertising if anything. Yet the term defines a particular type of cloud deployment – the ability to use cloud without having to have any servers in your business, and without having to specifically buy or rent any server resource from your cloud provider.

Sure, the provider (AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and the rest) uses servers, but it allocates resources around these as needed, taking server related matters out of the financial relationship it has with clients.

So, why go serverless?

Serverless cloud has some very distinct advantages for organisations working in a cloud environment. Sue Daley, associate director, technology and innovation, techUK, explains that many customers are drawn to low costs and the convenience often associated with serverless.

«Paying for compute resources based upon the amount of transaction performed rather than specifying a virtual machine spec to handle the busiest predicted workloads often equates to compute charging by the microsecond rather than the hour,» explains Daley. «Not having to consider or manage the underlying infrastructure, capacity or operating systems [means organisations can] just write and develop code.»

Ramanan Ramakrishna, Cloud CoE Lead at Capgemini added that those organisations which operate across multiple sites stand to gain the most from serverless.

«[It can be used] as an impetus to promote event-driven computing and a micro-services mindset among developers,» he explains. «This is because the applications being built have to be split into distinct services which can then be deployed and accessed from serverless cloud. This sets the stage for a quicker and easier adoption of agile development principles and CI/CD without falling into traditional waterfall methods.»

Is serverless right for you?

Well, you might already be using it.

«Serverless solutions may already be used by organisations that are unaware of the fact if they are using third-party APIs in their solutions already,» explains Tony Lock, distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics. Notwithstanding that, he explains, «it is certainly a good idea to learn a little about the practical implications of serverless computing to help understand when will be the right time to look more deeply or jump in and use».

A major advantage of serverless is the additional pricing options that come with paying for only what you use, rather than being forced to make a projection. This is particularly useful for small businesses and startups that are looking to trim costs and scale at the same time, but all businesses could stand to benefit.

«[Serverless] is a tool that can be used by any organisations regardless of size and scale», explains Daley. «Where it really can add value and impact is in helping small and growing organisations that only need computing power and resources when an event is triggered. For example, those innovative companies that are part of today’s growing gig economy such as car ride share app or a site that allow files or photos to be uploaded which only need to be able to spin up computing resources when a customer request, like a car ride, is requested.»

Things to consider

If serverless is something you feel would be a good fit for your business, there are a few things you need to consider.

Firstly, it’s important to understand the various needs of your business. «Learn how you could exploit serverless, find somewhere simple to start that is likely to have a fast return of visible benefits, and look for partners who have already started down the road and learn from their experiences, good and bad,» urges Lock.

It’s also important to consider your skillsets. Serverless is still a relatively young technology trend and most organisations will lack the technical skills to architect a serverless setup effectively. Of course, that’s doesn’t stop organisations outsourcing to other providers, which may be a short-term solution for most.

Ramanan Ramakrishna suggests «organisations should work towards incorporating serverless cloud into a digital transformation agenda for ‘born in the cloud’ initiatives rather than force-fitting it into traditional applications and associated methodologies».

There is the issue of going all in on serverless needlessly. Daniel Kroening, a professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, argues that the best way to adopt a serverless strategy is to weave it into existing setups.

«It makes sense to see them as a valuable addition to the existing toolkit available to developers and system designers – not as a replacement,» he explains.

Facebook’s heavily criticised app integration system has led to more than 146GB worth of data being left publicly exposed on AWS servers owned and operated by third-party companies.

It’s believed 540 million records relating to Facebook accounts were stored on the servers, including comments, likes, reactions, names and user IDs, obtained when users engaged with applications on the platform – the same methods unearthed during the investigation into Cambridge Analytica.

Two apps have been associated with the data hoard so far: Cultura Colectiva, a Mexico-based media company that promotes content to users in Latin America, and ‘At the Pool’, a service that matched users with other content, which has been out of operation since 2016.

At the Pool is said to have held 22,000 passwords for its service in plaintext alongside columns relating to Facebook user IDs – the fear being that many users may have been using the same password for their Facebook accounts.

Both of the app’s datasets were stored in Amazon S3 buckets which were found to be misconfigured to allow public download of the files. Despite being commonly used among businesses, as they allow data to be distributed across servers in a wide geographical area, there have been multiple incidents involving companies failing to adequately safeguard their data.

Facebooked condemned the practices of both the apps. «Facebook’s policies prohibit storing Facebook information in a public database,» said a Facebook spokesperson. «Once alerted to the issue, we worked with Amazon to take down the databases. We are committed to working with the developers on our platform to protect people’s data.»

AWS was made aware of the exposed data on 28 January 2019, following an alert issued by security research firm UpGuard. AWS confirmed it had received the report and was investigating it, but the data was only secured on Wednesday this week.

“AWS customers own and fully control their data,” an AWS spokesperson told IT Pro. “When we receive an abuse report concerning content that is not clearly illegal or otherwise prohibited, we notify the customer in question and ask that they take appropriate action, which is what happened here.”

This statement aligns with UpGuard’s in that the researchers alerted Cultura Colectiva before AWS on 10 January 2019 but have still yet to receive a response from the company.

Accenture, Experian, WWE, and the NSA have all been found to have stored data on unsecured AWS servers in recent years, with the problem becoming so prevalent that hackers have started creating tools specifically designed to target these buckets.

“While Amazon S3 is secure by default, we offer the flexibility to change our default configurations to suit the many use cases in which broader access is required, such as building a website or hosting publicly downloadable content,” said AWS. “As is the case on-premises or anywhere else, application builders must ensure that changes they make to access configurations are protecting access as intended.»

The news coincides with an article published in The Washington Post in which Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called for a ‘worldwide GDPR’ and greater regulation on the data protection principles of big tech outside the EU, despite the company itself facing 10 major GDPR investigations.

The discovery of the data has once again raised the issue of Facebook’s data sharing policies, something that facilitated the improper sharing of user data for political purposes by Cambridge Analytica. This prompted Facebook to change its sharing policies to restrict access by third-parties, although the fear is that data troves such as this have already been widely shared.

“Cambridge Analytica was the most high profile case that led to some significant changes in how Facebook interacts with third-party developers, but I suspect there are many troves of Facebook data sitting around where they shouldn’t be, including this one,» said privacy advocate Paul Bischoff of Comparitech.com.

“Even though Facebook has limited what information third-party developers can access, there’s still nothing Facebook can do about abuse or mishandling until after the fact,» he said.

A new partnership has been launched that will give Siemens customers access to SAS advanced and predictive analytics through the open IoT platform MindSphere.

The deal will focus on creating new IoT edge and cloud-enabled services, integrating machine learning and AI to reduce operational risk.

With near real-time embedded AI for IoT applications on the edge of the network, the collaboration will enable businesses to experiment with their IoT applications in a much freer way. The integration of SAS and Siemens platforms will increase workplace productivity by providing better insights into IoT use, the company claims, and will offer businesses the chance to implement optimised asset performance across the organisation.

Specifically, SAS and Siemens are targeting their combined tools at the manufacturing, healthcare, energy and utilities, smart cities, transportation and automotive industries.

“SAS is a recognised world-leader in advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. We are excited to leverage their analytics in MindSphere,” said Stephen Bashada, executive vice president and general manager of Siemens MindSphere. “The combination of Siemens’ deep industrial domain knowledge with SAS’ deep analytics knowledge is a powerful step forward for IoT.”

The partnership will offer both new and existing customers the opportunity to port and deploy SAS models into MindSphere, with access to its analytics capabilities.

“Siemens remain unmatched when it comes to revolutionising operational assets, software and processes. Siemens is committed to digitising the world’s industries and provides a unique platform for IoT to realise its full potential through AI,” said Peter Pugh-Jones, Head of Technology, SAS. “This partnership can accelerate adoption of the transformative value of IoT for our customers.”

The UK’s first-ever pet food-as-a-service specialist, PetShop.co.uk, has enjoyed phenomenal growth by running its business on NetSuite’s ERP platform.

The pet supply firm, which offers pet food as a subscription-based service dubbed Bottomless Bowl, has grown by 50 percent year-on-year and now stocks more than half a million pounds’ worth of stock spanning in excess of 10,000 products.

That’s a fantastic cloud success story when you consider that the business was born off the back of a £5,000 Prince’s Trust loan by former City worker Adam Taylor and his now-wife Lexi, out of the annoyance of running out of pet food and the inconvenience of how heavy it could be to transport.

The firm was using multiple different systems in its early days, which it found frustrating and added additional and unnecessary complexity. That’s what led to evaluating NetSuite, according to Taylor.

“We are using NetSuite for ERP, accounting, warehouse management and our pick, pack, and despatch management and we chose Bronto for email marketing because it was owned by NetSuite. Because it’s all under one umbrella, ultimately, nothing is impossible in terms of what we have tried to do,” Taylor told Cloud Pro.

“We’ve been able to grow 50% year-on-year for the last few years. It would have been very difficult to achieve that growth without NetSuite.”

While PetShop.co.uk has enjoyed immense growth thus far, it now wants to scale even further and will be using NetSuite’s many capabilities to support expansion plans.

It’s also building KPIs to help more effectively monitor the health of the business, according to Taylor.

“Our business model is already good, but I like the peace of mind of knowing how healthy it is. Alternatively, it gives us the ability to find if we have lots of leaking holes that we need to fix,” he said.

“We are building all this stuff in NetSuite now so when we grow it will grow with us. The transparency you get using cloud data means you can see instantly how the business is operating.  You can then use that information to steer your business decisions and you can be a lot more bullish.

“Having a business that is entrepreneur-owned has been key to our success. It’s forced us to look at whether we have a profitable model and where we can outthink our competitors and are able to pass on savings to customers,” Taylor told Cloud Pro.

Despite the business’ rapid rise to success, fuelled by technology, Taylor still recognises the importance of the human touch.

“I still write all the emails we send to our customers. We haven’t outsourced that,” he said. “It’s very key for any company to maintain that direct communication with the customer.”

Oracle NetSuite has launched a new benchmarking and insight resource centre designed to make it easier for organisations to make better-informed business decisions and grow using its platform. 

The ERP giant unveiled the knowledge centre, dubbed Brainyard, at its annual user conference in Las Vegas this week, effectively touting it as a game changer in terms of how the industry shares expertise and insight.

Many companies make use of professional consultancies to garner the data their need around technology implementations, but NetSuite felt this knowledge should actually be free, according to Jason Maynard, the company’s senior vice president of global field operations.

“We’re giving away the source code for business growth by providing unparalleled insights into every single critical business process. Companies tell us they want to benchmark their businesses, and we’re going to help them do that with Brainyard,” he said.

“Research firms and other vendors charge for this kind of resource, but we consider it part of our commitment to customer and partner success. We’re not just delivering bits with NetSuite: It’s not just about software; it’s about helping businesses grow.”

Specifically, Brainyard will be powered by insight derived from the company’s SuiteSuccess service and complemented by knowledge garnered from elsewhere in the company, such as value management, product management and solution consultancy.

Those visiting the Brainyard knowledge portal, will be able to access:

• A wealth of business information, such as industry status reports, and qualitative and quantitative research spanning 20 industry principles.
• Benchmarking insight and industry specific KPIs derived from 16,000 NetSuite customers as well we business performance data from FinListics.
• Performance-related advice and analysis designed to help organisations optimise their implementation in a range of formats from how to guides, best practice briefings and more.

Brainyard should help companies focus on the areas that will have the greatest impact on their future success and growth, Harish Mohan, NetSuite’s vice president of global strategy and international operations, told Cloud Pro.

“Part of [a focus on] growth is asking ‘Where should I grow?’ But if you ask any company that question, you’re going to get a list of 50 things. So, we can say that this is, generally speaking, where companies of your size find themselves, you’re in the growth curve and hear are the opportunities and challenges,” he said.

“It was driven by feedback and demand from people evaluating ERP. Companies used to come to us and say they are looking to change A, B, C, D… How is NetSuite going to make us better? Those were great questions and we wanted to figure out how to map that journey for people evaluating ERP.”

Mohan said at first NetSuite considered simply buying in the insight that would help answers some of these key questions, but that approach was dismissed due to the data being locked, too big, too abstract, not scalable or not in the right business language.

“So we decided that we were just going to do this ourselves. We’re going to provide the first business benchmark that is valid for companies and is actually consumable and delivers the insights they want,” Mohan added.

“For companies evaluating NetSuite, we’re providing a service that also gives you a blueprint of how to get from your ‘from’ state to your ‘to’ state.”

Intel has further demonstrated its intention to cosy up to cloud service providers, with the announcement of a number of cloud-focused products and features as part of its new second-generation Xeon Scalable platform.

More than fifty new processors were unveiled, including two new additions to the Xeon Gold family which have been specifically built to support networking functions. Both the Xeon Gold 6200 and 5200 series’ are NFV-optimised, and support Intel’s Select Speed technology.

A new feature introduced with the updated platform, Select Speed allows IaaS providers much more flexibility and granularity to manage the frequencies and per-core performance settings of the processors in their servers, enabling them to meet more elastic workload demands.

The new Xeon Gold chips also both promise up to 1.76x improvements to NFV workloads, according to Intel, as well as the option to assign a subset of their cores to handle high-priority virtualised workload acceleration.

To accompany the new processors, Intel also unveiled a new range of Intel Ethernet 800 Series controllers and adapters, which will be hitting production lines in Q3 this year. These networking components will support maximum speeds of 100Gb/sec, and will also make application response times more than 50% more predictable, with over 45% lower latency and thoughput improvements of more than 30% when running open source Redis – all through the implementation of Application Device Queues. They’ll also support iWARP and RoCE v2 Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), as well as dynamic device personalisation.

On the software side, the company introduced Intel Security Libraries for Data Center (Intel SecL-DC), providing an easier way for cloud companies to manage and deploy all of Intel’s hardware-rooted security technologies through a single set of tools and libraries which integrate with OpenStack, Kubernetes Extensions and Docker.

Edge computing is a growing area of interest for the cloud industry, and Intel isn’t ignoring it; the company launched a new range of Xeon D-1600 SoC processors for edge computing applications in high-density environments, including built-in QuickAssist and virtualisation tools. It also debuted its new line of Agilex FPGAs, built with a 10nm process andOptane support, aimed at hardware acceleration for edge computing.

Also updated was the company’s range of co-developed Select Solutions, produced in association with key partners to suit specific tasks. It launched new products geared towards AI, HPC and SAP HANA, as well as updates to its Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Stack HCI, VMware vSAN and more.