From Infrastructure Specialist to Data Center Operations Manager
As an administrator, you’re in charge of design, configuration, and maintenance. As a Windows Server administrator, you’ll need to reposition your skills for the hosted data center, so that you can work in standardised environments, with standardised applications. You’ll be monitoring, provisioning, and managing the data centre with Microsoft System Center.
As a cloud developer, you’ll need to understand how applications are designed, developed, and deployed for platform as a service (PaaS). You’ll focus on innovation and integration, and you’ll work more closely with business units to help them increase productivity. Consider expanding your skills to include identity and access control, through Windows Communication Foundation, and HTML5, to provide richer websites without the need for third-party plug-ins.
As you move from your role as database administrator to data steward in a cloud environment, you’ll need to be able to design and manage databases anywhere. Being able to architect a cloud strategy and identify data to move to cloud storage will be important skills as you work with SQL Azure cloud-based relational database services built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies.
As an IT administrator, you’ve probably specialised in a particular technology, such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, or Microsoft Lync. As a Microsoft Office 365 administrator, you’ll build on this expertise as you move from an on-premise deployment model to a public cloud model. You’ll need to develop your planning, design, and infrastructure skills to migrate, deploy, and administer a hosted Office 365 solution.