Step up from ops on your IT career path

Emerging forces, such as cloud computing and security, shift the focus of IT operations jobs from traditional hardware and software concerns to business-aligned efforts. Powerful devices, architectures, software stacks and third-party options challenge enterprise IT deployments and the staff that run them.

If your daily IT operations tasks and goals revolve around cost management, service levels and performance rather than break/fix and configuration -- or if you want the opportunity to cross into a new field -- peruse these four hot job titles: application performance analyst, IT service broker, cloud computing specialist and IT security specialist.

Companies that rely on cloud and other third-party services find they need in-house cloud computing specialists and IT service brokers to navigate the complex offerings and price models from providers. Businesses in every industry must act as tech companies to stay competitive, making application performance and data security paramount on corporate agendas. This focus on IT-enabled success calls for IT operations professionals who are willing to develop the necessary mindset, building on existing skills and knowledge.

These are certainly not the only new IT roles appearing across the business landscape -- there are big data analysts and internet of things developers, among others -- but they represent the most exciting and important IT operations trends with tangible implications for business.

As IT operations jobs morph into and meld with business operations, and emerging technologies mature into enterprise standards, these roles are certain to evolve again. Roles will change quickly in IT for the foreseeable future, and IT professionals must continuously adapt and position themselves to meet future business needs. If IT cannot provide answers, the business will find them elsewhere.

The emergence of performance as a key business indicator is an epiphany of modern IT.

IT is now seen as a business service provider. Services may take the form of operational tasks: help desk ticket response/resolution time, support of Domain Name Server and other business IT services, support for Microsoft Exchange and other core business applications. These services must operate at peak efficiency, use computing resources judiciously and remain highly available.

Service and application performance analysis relies on powerful monitoring tools that track how users engage with enterprise applications and services. The analyst must gauge user experience based on metrics for traffic, transactions, response times and other criteria. An application performance analyst uses alerts to trigger troubleshooting and resolution, and recommends resource or architectural changes that can enhance service and application performance.

The application performance analysis career path is increasingly important as IT takes a more hands-off role in workload deployment. IT automation and orchestration are key to user self-service, wherein business elements provision resources for workloads without direct IT intervention. But self-service doesn't absolve IT of the responsibility to support those workloads and ensure adherence to service-level agreements. Application performance analysis jobs might require that the analyst track all workloads created by business groups, monitor the resources used, gauge each workload's adherence to established configuration policies, and intervene effectively to fix configurations or solve problems.

Traditional in-house, on-premises IT is only one of many potential avenues to supply important services to a business. Today, there are varied alternatives in a third-party outsourced data center or even the public cloud. The server racks at HQ are no longer the only game in town, which means data center admin is no longer the only viable IT career path.

To remain relevant to the business, IT professionals must act as internal IT service brokers who match the most effective and price-conscious offerings with the users or business units that need them, and ensure that the resulting service capacity and quality meet requirements.

An IT service broker helps decide which option is best for the business, and does not simply insist upon internal IT resources. For example, a department needs archival storage for data each month. An IT service broker evaluates the storage requirements, compares suitable options -- in-house data storage versus Amazon Web Services' Glacier in this example -- and presents the department with a reliable cost and risk assessment for each approach. The goal is to guide the business to a suitable technology or service.

The IT service broker can also bring cloud expectations in line with reality. For example, a business found a public cloud application deployment appealing, but the IT service broker's analysis showed that an in-house deployment would actually be less expensive over the long term and better-suited to the company's availability demands and regulatory compliance obligations. Similarly, an enterprise resource planning application deployed and supported in-house requires licensing, ongoing maintenance and support, while the software-as-a-service offering is managed by a third party -- Salesforce is a prime example of a SaaS tool that works equally as well as installed systems without the secondary costs.

Cloud computing is a preferred deployment structure for highly scalable and flexible workloads: It's Utility computing that emphasizes user self-service and demand- and usage-based cost models. But cloud services can be complex and confusing, often mixing à la carte compute and storage instances with myriad support services that load balance, scale and monitor workloads. Each piece of the cloud computing puzzle has a price, often tiered by usage and contrasted with free options.

Organizations need a cloud computing specialist to sort through pricing and performance limitations from providers both broad and niche. A cloud computing specialist helps developers and operations personnel architect a suitable on-demand cloud environment that supports highly scalable workload performance while reining in unpredictable costs. If you follow this IT career path, be prepared to offer guidance on compliance, availability and other factors, so business units understand whether a workload belongs on a public cloud or in a data center.

Cloud computing specialists can also be deeply involved with private cloud service creation and expansion: A private deployment brings cloud computing benefits to the enterprise while it maintains infrastructure control and visibility. A cloud computing specialist can architect, implement and maintain private deployments and merge public and private environments into a hybrid cloud where workloads and data move seamlessly as resources demand or costs dictate.

With the emerging importance of multicloud, a cloud computing specialist must possess expertise in more than one public cloud service suite, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. They should guide business leaders, developers and operations staff to support the most cross-platform-compatible deployment schemes for high availability and cost management.

Unauthorized intrusion into enterprise systems, coupled with the potential loss or theft of valuable business data, has business leaders combing through IT security specialist resumes.

The disruption wrought by hackers, or an employee who exposes sensitive information, has embarrassed many business and government organizations -- and left them to deal with regulatory or legal repercussions.

An IT security specialist must protect changing architectures, as traditional perimeters roll back to allow API-based communications. Greater communication also means businesses collect and store increasing volumes of sensitive data. IT security specialists must implement and maintain technologies and processes that can halt unauthorized access, secure data at rest and in flight, and mitigate a constantly changing threat landscape.

This IT career path combines traditional expertise, such as vulnerability hardening for hardware and OSes, with new skills to manage privileges, identify and report aberrant activities and recognize and halt intrusions.

The incident response window has shrunk to almost zero. New attack mechanisms and behaviors can appear without warning, so IT security tools must operate dynamically relying on machine learning and analytics to automatically spot and mitigate potential threats -- even before the malicious activity unfolds.