Many people asked me about the skills needed when they want to shift to the cloud computing ?!

Interesting question actually, and I'll try to write down my thoughts about this ...

Well, Cloud computing won’t run without people. IT experts will still need to supply core business functions and applications ..

As most companies will run some of their technology inside the cloud (adopt to the cloud) and others will run outside the cloud (on premises or I'll call it in their private cloud setup). Such models will require strong service management between these internal and external setups.

Example for this is some organizations will still need to use networked systems and some integration services and network engineers will still have to solve routing and management problems and challenges. All of these skills of an IT person and IT needs won't disappear by adopting to the cloud.

A new mindset will be needed to adapt to the change as well, by learning new cloud management tools (hypervisor and infrastructure management tools), the deployment models, the development platforms and the way the application is being deployed to any cloud provider.

This is on the technical side of the issue.

On the management side the manager who manages a project or business deployed into the cloud will need to learn some skills like:

1. Negotiation skills, in order to negotiate on service SLA with his/her clients and also to resolve conflicts.
2. Process management, every manager will need to have some skills related to the process management, configuration management, change management, release management etc.
3. Cloud market is rapidly changing and evolving ... so business owners and managers should cope with the market needs with the agility and velocity needed to cope with these changes.
4. Innovation, as the cloud market is full of new opportunities.

So, generally speaking, shifting to cloud needs a very flexible and open-minded kind of personality ...

Hope this can help in answering this frequent question ...