The saying “The sky is limit” has taken on new meaning. When applied to IT, when we aim towards the sky, we hit “The Cloud”. There is no hotter topic right now in IT circles then cloud computing. While I had previously blogged about the cloud and how IT learners should position themselves in this new paradigm, what I wrote just 12 months ago already seems so outdated! So much has advanced in the past year; I felt it was time to revisit and encourage all of you to “Get Your Head into the Cloud”.
I base my new found cloud energy on a recent Microsoft conference I attended. While this particular conference was more platform and technology related and not educational industry focused, it is clear that what Microsoft and other software, services and technology vendors are doing will have a huge impact on our training industry and all of us employed in the IT Learning area of this industry.
Many of you know what advantages the cloud brings, lower costs, increased efficiencies, increased uptime, less maintenance, and increased security. In our training industry, we need to understand how to best go about choosing training applications that should be moved to the cloud. It seems logical that the learning portal is destined to become a cloud-based application. The opportunity for the learning portal to collaborate with other cloud-based applications such as the newly released Microsoft Office 365 (a collection of Office products running in the cloud), the ability for the learning portal to do activity and resource tracking more efficiently combined with the ability to make it available anywhere/anytime is one of the greatest benefits of moving the portal to the cloud.
The time is coming quickly where platform products for the IT learning cloud will be rolling out. We see several vendors already offering talent management products, e-learning platforms such as VenueGen to “affordably train, collaborate, and share content online” and even certification programs to offer technologists the skills and certifications for virtualization and cloud technologies. It will be expected of us to guide our training divisions towards the cloud so, don’t delay, it’s time to get your head into the cloud.
As always, I would love to hear from you and I look forward to your continued feedback. Feel free to contact me anytime at aust1648@gmail.com.
