How to Find the Best Hybrid Cloud Talent for Your Company?

We have heard a lot about cloud by now. A secular move to the cloud is the unwritten rule in the business town.
 

At this juncture, say- 
A Company decides to move to VMware cloud and
Another Company wants to move to Amazon Web Services
 

Further, the first company realized that their IT staff has a keen interest in new technology and opted to retrain them.
 

And, the other company charged up themselves that it is the time to acquire new people who can expand their existing team skills too.
 

In both the cases, the basic question remains same, ie., How to Find the Best Hybrid Cloud Talent for the Company?
 

If your answer is yes, please read further.

Cloud computing has influenced lots of businesses and enterprises to get on their wheels with the cloud. Whether it is a small startup or an established enterprise that belongs to varied business segments, the cloud has become the talk of the business town.
 

Subsequently, small, midsize, and even the large enterprises realized that it is challenging to keep up the hiring process and get along with the talent needs.
 

The pressure of hiring a cloud talent is obviously felt across the organization as it is new and is subject to evolve continuously. Here comes the split movement-
 

• One is moving to a cloud-based recruitment program through an external search
• Another is giving the ownership to an employee who is working on an outside project but expresses an unbelievable certainty and interest to bring his cloud skills to the enterprise, and thus moving the talent to the new cloud position.
   

However, in both the cases, implementing and managing the cloud capabilities do observe challenges to meet for.
 

The implementation of the cloud itself demands additional skill sets and one has to match the skills with the continuously evolving changes. And, the current skill sets dictates clearly that it is time to retrain or hire new.
 

For instance, a company decided to move to VMware cloud and another company for Amazon Web Services.
 

• The first company may realize their IT staff has a keen interest and opt for retraining the staff.
• Whereas the other company would decide it is a chance to acquire new people who may expand the team skills.
   

Then, what is the answer to the basic question, How to Find the Best Hybrid Cloud Talent for Your Company?
 

To be with the sayings of the leaders:
 

“Technology procurement teams need to be empowered to help the business through the cloud procurement process.” Luke Ellery, Gartner Research Director.

“Hybrid cloud talent, in general, is in high demand,” Blake Angove, director of technology services at staffing and recruiting firm LaSalle Network.

Similarly, on the other hand, the IT professionals have identified that the cloud is the biggest technology that impacts their career. It is rated as the next technology influencer by the respondents.
 

As cloud touches many different parts of the business, it is a call for the IT professionals to acquire the skills that make them deal with it in different scenarios.
 

For instance,
 

• Data and analytics
• Security architecture
• IoT deployments
• Infrastructure
• Operation
• Packaged SaaS products
• And more
   

In brief, the adoption of cloud is a multidimensional and multiyear program. The cloud talent or the hybrid cloud talent, in particular, gets his hands on three main responsibilities namely,
 

• Lead for a cultural change
• Develop a cloud strategy
               [Do you want to know why cloud strategy should be considered for your business environment: you can read more here]
• Coordinate the architecture
   

Recommended for You Why Cloud-Strategy Stands First in Your IT Business Environment?  

Moreover, “The responsibilities in architecting the cloud will be very fluid day to day and over time and will vary from organization to organization. As the cloud computing market matures and the organization improves its cloud adoption, the architecture will also need to evolve to support the tasks and projects in front” says Kyle Hilgendorf, research vice president, and distinguished analyst.
 

Moving forward, in the search for implementing different clouds like private, public, or the hybrid, it is an obvious finding that hybrid cloud is gaining more traction. And it needs a mix of hands-on skills. Hybrid cloud talent is more of specific skills rather than the job title.
 

So, if we know the needed right mix of hands-on skills, then it implies that the question “How to Find the Best Hybrid Cloud Talent for the Company” has a relevant backup answer.
 

Henceforth, let’s understand and highlight the Hybrid Cloud Talent skills now.
 

1. Configuration Management:

Hybrid cloud and/or the multi-cloud environment involves complexity and new operational considerations.
 

Automation forms an umbrella term here where it directs for scripting, automated application configuration, automated infrastructure environment and so forth.
 

Evidently, scripting, coding skills [infrastructure as a code, data center as a code], experience with configuration management skills, create infrastructure templates, pipelines, and, etc., is needed.
 

2. Source Control Management:

Source Control Management tools are built to run across the open source and commercial software environment as well.
 

It delivers a range of functionality facilitating the users to track and modify the code lines. It offers a centralized management portal and facilitates the team to collaborate seamlessly.
 

As a result, the best hybrid cloud talent would be able to offer pull requests, feature-based workflows, inline discussions, branch permissions, and integrate utilizing an array of technologies.
 

3. Work with Multiple Environment:

The terminology hybrid cloud itself substantiates that the IT professional must be well versed in native and hybrid clouds to derive benefits.
 

The core IT skills that move around compute, networking, storage, security, and the ability to leverage these skills in the cloud is the demand.
 

Apart from these, the old school skills like experience with physical infrastructure architecture like PXE-boot, large-scale DHCP, dynamically-updated DNS, IPAM software, and, etc., is helpful.
 

Consequently, professionals with hands-on, hyper-scale cloud architecture experience are the need.
 

4. Evaluate Workload:

The fact that many a time gets overlooked is the presence of relevant trait how to evaluate the workload suitability?
 

If the professional understand the optimal use cases, the right workloads that match with the right environment, it serves better.
 

In order to serve better, the professional must be able to recognize and cognize the platform into/from the cloud from/into the traditional stack.
 

5. Security and Compliance:

Security is a phobic term in the IT sector and cloud is not an exception. While implementing cloud, apart from implementation plans, analysis of sensitivity to risks as per the cloud models, data storage, and transfer mechanism is essential with reference to compliance.
 

The professional must be able to meet the prevailing and predictable challenge as well. A defensive implementation would give long-term benefits of cloud moments.
 

Thus, knowledge regarding the cloud security challenges and the ways to mitigate the challenges is anticipated.

A few of the challenges include Data breach, Secure APIs, Vulnerabilities, Hijacking, APIs, Data loss, and, Revenue loss. You may recall the mitigation ways here- 7 Top Cloud Security Challenges and its Solutions
 

6. Database Management:

In order to move the data to the cloud, the defining characteristics include elasticity, scalability, availability, redundancy, distribution, support, cost, and easier manageability.
 

It is a known fact that the unique features of cloud databases are its ability to distribute data beyond geographical barriers from a single physical server to several through virtualization. To support this, the Microsoft, Amazon, VMware, and other techno-leads offer their own optimized applications or software.
 

So, it is expected to have a flow in the popular databases like MySQL, Oracle, NoSQL, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server.
 

7. Awareness about evolving changes:

As a forward-thinking professional, it is necessary to keep in a lane with the evolving changes or adaptations, like the containers, microservices, kubernete cluster, edge computing, IoT architecture, continuous integration and delivery, serverless computing, and, more.
 

In addition, articulation of the cloud to business goals will do wonders.
 

So, I believe with these skill sets, a Job Description to find the best hybrid talent could be written by default.
 

Still, here is a pooled snippet from JDs for a hybrid cloud talent as in Naukri.com, iimjobs.com, and Indeed.com.
 

• Experience to set up kubernetes cluster/Docker
• Mandatory working knowledge of containerization
• Migrate monolithic application to micro-service architecture
• Configure and deploy Grafana, Envoy, Prometheus
• Exposure on languages like Golang, Python, Java, JavaScript
• Knowledge in Shell scripting, Linux,
• AWS, Azure, VMware, and Softlayer
• Automate build, test, run.
• Server-side frameworks knowledge
• Data visualization, UI technologies
• Industry certification
• And more.
   

Of the required Industry certifications, a few of them are AWS Solutions Certified Architect, IBM Cloud Certifications, and, etc. You may have a look at the other best cloud certifications 2018 here.
 

In addition, a holistic understanding of categories like the outsourcing, remote hosting, commercial implications, contracts, legal and regulatory requirements would help you to find the right talent.
 

Moreover, the right candidate may not be the active job seeker, but a passive candidate too who may change their mind to continue learning and evolve.
 

Last, but not the least, a competitive pay is an ongoing task of the talent equation by default.
 

In a nutshell, as there is an ever-increasing complexity and popularity in regards to cloud hiring a responsible party smoothens the whole process altogether.