I have a keen interest in cloud technology and have been following its trend inSingapore. I am aware that IDA is has identified the potential of cloud computing is attracting cloud vendors to invest and host their services here with initiatives such asCloudInnovationCenterand recently theGreenDataCenter. Cloud There has also been ongoing promotion to encourage organizations to adopt it. Government ministries have adopted it e.g. MOE are Google Apps, an example of SaaS, for their communication and collaboration and tool.
I have attended talks given by institutions (UC Berkley) and vendor (Microsoft Azure, Red Hat Inc). From all these talks, I do have the basic understanding of that make up of this technology. There are 3 layers: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service(Paas). The main benefit that this technology gives is scalable, instant and cost saving computing power. Organization does not have to invest in IT infrastructure but only pay for IT services that they utilize e.g. instead of setting up an infrastructure of their own, NCS uses Microsoft Azure and is billed less than $2000 to host live video streaming of 2010 NDP.
With the buzz on cloud computing, training and manpower comes into consideration. When organizations adopt cloud computing, there will be roles in the traditional network infrastructure management that will be phase out with reliance to remote resources. However, a wide range of new roles are created. Institutions with support from IDA, are starting to provide certification courses. I am myself looking around for a suitable cloud certification course to anticipate the opportunity in joining this field in future.
