Career choice?

[darren.dow.98]

Hello

I am in a point in my career where I cannot decide where to go with my career I have been working in 2nd Line IT Support for over 3 years which includes server and ad admin, troubleshooting etc.

I am MSCA, ITIL Foundation, SQL server certified, Rackspace CloudU Engineer,IBM Cloud architect.

I am now at the point where I want to decide on where I want to go with my career should I focus and move into security or Cloud engineer/architecture.

As you can see I have I have started to move toward Cloud with the intention of becoming a Cloud Architect I am starting wonder if there will be a need for this?

I am also studying or my degree in Computing,IT and Business part time.

This is kind of how I see my career path going:

2014

Get certified in Windows Server 2012 and VMware VCP5

2015

CCNA

2016

Then either security or Cloud

Just looking to get people thoughts.

[Ewald Horn]

Why would you split the two? My biggest pain is with the lack of security in cloud solutions. If you look at companies like Amazon, they dedicate a serious amount of time and effort to cloud architecture, but not nearly the same amount of effort to security.

The reason for this is simple - security, at the end of the day, is not the sole responsibility of the cloud provider. I see great value in knowing and understanding how the structure cloud services securely. With the way things are going, it's becoming easier and easier to build cloud services, but harder and harder to properly secure them.

There seems to be a movement of interoperability between cloud services, with different providers making API's available that you can use to tap into their services, like SalesForce and even Daniweb! Take for example the DW API - you can fetch articles from forums, and, in essence, DW is some kind of cloud service, at least, from that perspective. There's a distinct security challenge here - you don't know what's being pulled into your system, and relying on DW to provide all your security isn't a good strategy, no offense meant to DW :)

In this scenario, you'd want someone with a solid understanding of security to help set up and design your services, incoming and outgoing, to make sure you address the possible risks involved. At the same time, you'd need this person to also understand how different cloud services work, so you'd need a multi-disciplined expert, something you could become!

[Amol555]

Networking field is aslways best. do certification and get a job.
that's it.