While the US economy, along with the rest of the world is severely impacted by COVID-19, business at technology companies is holding its place – thriving even. Out of this tech sector, if there was ever more demand for cloud computing, it’s during this global pandemic. Cloud computing is a key part of digital transformation strategy at enterprise level with cloud services expected to become a $300 billion market by 2021. As cloud goes on to dominate the business landscape, job positions related to cloud has seen a manifold interest from job seeker and employer both.
According to a forecast report by marketsandmarkets.com, the global impact of this pandemic is expected to increase the cloud market size from USD 233 billion in 2019 to USD 295 billion in 2021. And this growth in market will bring along a lot of job opportunities. The major factors that will drive the growth of cloud market are:
- cloud service providers (CSPs)
- internet service providers (ISPs)
- managed hosting providers, and;
- investment in IT infrastructure by enterprises to support WFH workforce.
“Pandemic Boosts Cloud Computing Demand”, read the title of an article published by the financial investment firm Zacks in April. This increased demand by employers in the cloud space presents a prime opportunity for engineers with cloud computing experience. Job positions that have seen a rise in demand during COVID-19 are:
- Software Engineer
- Cloud Architect
- Full Stack Developer
- Cloud Engineer
- Data Engineer
- Cloud Security Specialists
- Data Scientist, and;
- System Engineer
People working from home and observing social distancing has increased the reliance on services from the technology industry and accelerating trends that were already being used. There is a tremendous spike in the use of video conferencing, online classes, e-commerce shopping, remote project collaborations and entertainment such as gaming and TV. According to a report issued by Business Insider in April, Microsoft has decidedly frozen hiring for some roles while still seeks relevant talent within its colossal cloud computing business, Azure. Amazon on the other hand has been actively hunting AWS tech talent since the start of the pandemic for positions such as Systems Engineers, Support Engineers, Development Engineers and Solutions Architects. Google Cloud continues to publicize jobs on its sites in the departments of Cloud Product Managers, Cloud Software Engineers and Cloud Consultants among others. Important to note here is that it isn’t only cloud giants that are hiring. Cloud companies worldwide have the same trend as well as other organizations requiring cloud-related skills.
A lot of companies were already closing down their own data centers and instead started to rent computing from Google, Amazon or Microsoft pre-COVID. This trend is likely to pick up pace as companies look to expand their corporate technology infrastructure in the wake of employees working from home. The leading cloud providers now have a much higher competitive edge as enterprises increasingly incorporate Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in their businesses. The most relevant examples in this regard are the IBM’s acquisition of RedHat and Google’s new machine learning tool, AI Hub. The market share of Google Cloud Platform is less than Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS) with regards to public cloud adoption, still, jobs requiring Google Cloud skills have increased over 50%. With more and more companies around the world adopting the cloud and understanding its power, the need for experts in this field has soared drastically and opportunities have grown exponentially.
What’s even more promising, cloud tech sector is going to benefit from the changed consumer trends well even after the pandemic is over as the forecasts suggest. Even as many industries are contracting, there’s an ever-more pressing demand for technologists who can do it all, from developing cloud infrastructures to designing e-commerce portals.
