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Its no surprise that high tech digital skills are in high demand. To keep up with the more-than-ever geographically distributed workforce, organizations are distributing workloads across multiple clouds. Meanwhile, the Internet of Things means more people are connected on more devices with users looking to edge-fast services to meet their needs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, computer and information technology job markets are expected to grow 13% in the next decade with much of that growth attributed to demand in cloud computing, big data collection and storage, and cybersecurity.1

With that growth, higher learning institutions are seeing a parallel rise in demand for better, less resource-intensive ways to teach key digital skills. Enter the Academic Cloud. The Academic Cloud offers shared tech and server resources across institutions to expand reach to students while providing lower maintenance and management costs. It provides a highly scalable, realistic, hands-on learning solutions that students and instructors can access 24/7.

The components of the Academic Cloud are simple. VMware software licenses are overlaid with a powerful software suite of lab applications by Network Development Group (NDG). The software and virtual lab environment are then united, hosted and managed by an academic institution. I virtually caught up with the two organizations behind the Academic Cloud tech and two colleges putting it into practice. Rich Weeks (NDG), Kelly Caudle (SCC), Dr. Jorge Crichigno (USC) and Jessamine Chin (VMware) sat down with me to share their take on the impact of the Academic Cloud on the current digital skills boom.

Can you share how NDG and VMware work together to create the Academic Cloud?

Rich Weeks (NDG): I would say that first and foremost, its the combination of NDG lab management software (NDG online portal and NETLAB+) with VMwares donated evaluation software licenses and multi-cloud solutions (ESXi hypervisor and vCenter) that enable academic institutions to host complex labs for information technology and cyber education. These are unique solutions that together allow academic institutions that are willing to collaborate to create their own scalable and cost-effective Academic Cloud.

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What do you see as the main advantages of the Academic Cloud?

Rich Weeks (NDG): Theres really quite a long list of things that make the Academic Cloud special. For starters, academic institutions, especially those departments with lab-heavy curriculum, often find themselves struggling with budgets. Its in those resource-intensive and resource-constrained lab environments where the Academic Cloud really comes through. It provides researchers, professors and instructors compute resources for hands-on career skills that may otherwise be cost prohibitive given limited or expiring funding. So, in an example where servers and management are set up and performed at a host location, the startup and maintenance costs are shared across multiple institutions, reaching large numbers of geographically disparate learners. Working with VMware, USC and SCC, this model is cost effectively hosting complex, expensive labs, like introduction to data center virtualization, that may otherwise not be available to learners who are economically challenged or attending institutions that do not have funds for a lab setup. Why is this important? High schools participating in the VMware IT Academy can teach important core technical skills using real world data center labs aligned to VMware courses.

As far as the students are concerned, the Academic Cloud allows for the creation of very realistic hands-on labs to challenge learners. Students work on labs where things break and they need to fix them. They get stuck and have to work through real-life scenarios to get un-stuck. Everything about the learner experience is similar to what theyll face out in the real world.

And theres always, of course, the classic case for optimal server utilization. Servers are expensive resources that often go under-utilized. With virtualization running, the shared system resources mean equipment idle time is significantly reduced.

If Stanly Community College (SCC) wasnt leveraging the Academic Cloud, how would things be different for the college? For students?

Kelly Caudle (SCC): Stanly Community College is a very small school in rural North Carolina. Without the Academic Cloud and the VMware Academic Software Licenses that support the cloud and our other NDG NETLAB+ systems, SCC students would be technological have-nots. Additionally, so would the literally hundreds of thousands who have been able to take part in labs through our academic data center in the cloud. Without the VMware Academic Software Licenses, our data center would not exist and students in partner programs like the VMware IT Academy vSphere courses requiring lots of compute resources for labs may struggle to have a real-world learning experience. Stanly Community College uses our academic data center to change the lives of local students and remote students on a daily basis. This is all made possible through our partnerships with companies like NDG and VMware. The VMware Academic Software Licenses are really the glue that holds together our entire academic hands-on virtual learning environment.

How does the Academic Cloud impact the University of South Carolina (USC) and its students?

Dr. Jorge Crichigno (USC): The technology used by the Academic Cloud has unique features that are really unmatched in the marketplace. The Academic Cloud enables our university to continue offering access to laboratory exercises to our students in a variety of courses. It turns out that the timing of the Academic Cloud deployment was key, as physical laboratories that are used for face-to-face offerings werent available anymore once the pandemic erupted. The platform and our NETLAB+ system enabled the migration of physical laboratories to virtual laboratories, without compromising any rigor or hands-on activities. The platform made the migration of physical laboratories to virtual laboratories possible, without compromising any rigor or hands-on activities.

The Academic Cloud and NETLAB+ platforms combined with the VMware software licenses serve multiple purposes and programs here at the University of South Carolina and our partner institutions. Information technology, cyber intelligence, computer science, and computer information systems all regularly use our Academic Cloud or NETLAB+. Additionally, our PhD students and collaborators at institutions like the University of South Florida and the University of Texas at San Antonio, use the platform to conduct PhD research and develop innovative solutions to significant engineering problems. Weve seen the results of this work published in top journals and shared at conferences around the world.

What do you see as the biggest impact of the Academic Cloud?

Jessamine Chin (VMware): Equity is one of the three outcomes that were focused on for VMwares 2030 agenda. We believe that technology plays a critical role in building a digital future that is equitable, accessible and inclusive. And we see the Academic Cloud as a great example of how our technology can provide more equitable access and opportunity to students, instructors and researchers around the world.

Our partnership with the University of South Carolina, Stanly Community College and NDG demonstrates how the Academic Cloud provides a platform for individuals and other academic institutions to access learning resources like labs, content and research that they may otherwise not been able to afford. For students and instructors, this provides access to additional support to gain valuable job skills like data center virtualization or cloud concepts.

Can you share why partnering with colleges and universities is so important to VMware?

Jessamine Chin (VMware): VMware has a long history of working closely with colleges and universities, beginning with our founders who pioneered virtual machines at Stanford University, to our partnerships today that help students build the capabilities to advance their careers and the field of IT overall.

Also, sustainability has long been inherent in our technology solutions. As companies virtualize their digital operations, they benefit from lower costs, increased flexibility and more resilience but also a reduced carbon footprint. In fact, VMware has helped its customers avoid more than 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions to date.

The world demands more from us, so were pushing ourselves to redefine what a sustainable digital future means. And part of that future involves realigning our business model around multi-cloud and SaaS. We know that the students coming out of these educational institutions and programs today will be the key talent to help VMware progress this vision, as well as enable VMware customers to advance zero carbon goals.

The Academic Cloud is fueling universities computer science labs and research efforts. Students at those institutions are experiencing an unmatched introduction into virtualization and multi-cloud concepts, while gaining deep skills that will fill a growing IT need in the industry.

Is your institution adapting to meet the needs of this current digital skills boom? Take the next step to learn more about creating an Academic Cloud for your institution and students. To learn more about how your institution could benefit from VMware solutions, check out the IT Academy for research, webinars, software licenses and more.

1U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

About

VMware IT Academy

The VMware IT Academy provides students with the skills and education needed to succeed in a softwaredefined future. IT Academy creates a collaborative relationship with academic institutions around the world and provides them with software content, labs, and course materials developed by VMware. This enables their students to become more knowledgeable on VMware technology and better equipped with technical skills to advance their careers.

Network Development Group (NDG)

NDGs mission is to help people develop technology job skills. They partner with academic programs, academic institutions, industry, government and nonprofits to help learners develop the skills necessary to be employed. NDGs remote access training solutions, NDG Online and NETLAB+, enable learners worldwide to develop IT skills and prepare for rewarding careers.

Stanly Community College

Stanly Community College is an accredited two-year public institution, located just outside of Charlotte, NC, offering a variety of seated and online college degrees. The Network Management curriculum at Stanly Community College prepares individuals for employment supporting network infrastructure environments. Students will learn how to use technologies to provide reliable transmission and delivery of data, voice, image and video communications in business, industry and education.

University of South Carolina

Founded in 1801, the university is located in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. The Department of Integrated Information Technology at the University of South Carolina is at the forefront of information technology and health informatics. They offer undergraduate and graduate degree programs led by outstanding faculty. Their research focuses on the areas of cyber infrastructure, database systems, data analytics, health information technology and human-computer interaction.

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Academic Cloud and the Digital Skills Boom - Yahoo Finance

Fabiano Ribeiro, Business Development Manager of Services and Security at IT-One, highlights the importance of companies optimizing the use of the enterprise cloud, taking advantage of aspects such as scalability and continuous evolution as allies of their business.

In the future, when our children and grandchildren study the first decades of the 21st century, they will surely see that this will have been a period of intense revolution.

Considering technology, for example, we are experiencing the emergence of a series of innovations that have undeniably changed and are continuously changing the way we live, produce and consume things on our planet.

In this context, however, it is necessary to emphasize that no other concept, until now, has been as important for this transformation as cloud computing with its unique model of distribution of services and information.

Currently we are all being impacted by cloud applications. From smartphone applications to the machines of the globalized industry connected and controlled through Artificial Intelligence and IoT solutions, everything passes through a sky full of clouds.

However, it does not mean that all companies and markets are already really managing to take advantage of the possibilities opened up by cloud computing to the fullest.

For example, according to a recent survey by IDC, about one third of executive and operational leaders are still unsure about the impact of cloud computing on their business security.

The analysis also indicates that almost 40% of companies continue to rely on mostly local structures, with their own servers and data centers. Therefore, there is nothing better than asking ourselves: How can we expand this market and use the real potential of cloud applications in companies?

The first and most important step in comprehending this issue is understanding that each case requires unique assessments and designs. What works for one company is not necessarily the answer for another.

This is the great attraction of the cloud: although it is undeniable to say that there are no ready-made answers for anyone, it is also true to say that cloud computing is a field full of possibilities with endless ways to apply technologies to maximize operations, according to the real demands of each business.

The point is to evaluate the implementation well. It is necessary, among other things, to understand what information and processes are most critical, what type of availability is required and even what rules and legislation regulate the company data. Therefore, it will be easier to find safer and more efficient ways to harness the cloud potential.

In terms of planning and monitoring actions it is important because we should remember that technology itself wont do anything: The success of an innovation strategy definitely depends on understanding the needs of the company, the critical points that need to be prioritized during a migration project and the observation of which technologies and features are truly suited to the project requirement.

Another important thing is to understand that the cloud and the local structure are not mutually exclusive. It is not a coincidence that companies of all areas are migrating their IT infrastructures to hybrid environments, combining data centers and on-premises services with cloud-based applications.

The IDC survey revealed that more than 40% of companies intend to expand the mix of on-premises and cloud infrastructure solutions, seeking more flexibility and resilience for their business.

The main reason is the agility that the cloud offers. For example, more than 85% of CIOs surveyed by IDC said that investing in cloud-based solutions and services is a priority, because the cloud helps accelerate the implementation of new capabilities that can be quickly provisioned, scaled and put to work.

The cloud is an interesting way to break old innovation cycles, accelerating and streamlining decision making with more collaboration, data analysis and intelligence brought by advances in data and analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Machine Learning that are only gaining ground thanks to the doors opened by cloud computing.

In other words, the gains go far beyond being just a virtual space to store documents and make applications available.

Considering the accelerated dynamics in which we live, cloud computing has proved to be fundamental for us to achieve, in practice, the agility of the go-to-market processes of new products and ideas.

It is not by chance that it is estimated that, in some cases, the use of tools based on cloud environments allow reductions of more than 80% in the time required for the implementation of a new project.

Therefore, it is increasingly important to establish ways to simplify daily routines and maximize attention to IT services. Having specialized partners in each stage of this Digital Transformation adds insights and practical knowledge to make the most complex decisions easier and meet the daily challenges of the business, suggesting options with greater adherence to real needs.

Regardless of the path to be taken, organizations must be able to plan and analyze well the characteristics of each model, preferably counting on the support of those who are daily utilizing this market.

With constant changes, the assertiveness of the teams lies in bringing together trends and needs to design the best data migration strategy or balance between what needs to remain in-house, in data centers and on-premises servers and what can be arranged in a cloud tool. It remains to be seen who is ready to follow this journey, innovating in a safe, sustainable and efficient way.

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How to enhance the security and productivity of the enterprise cloud - Intelligent CIO

For several years, Peter Ambrose, MD of The Partnership, contemplated moving the 20 million files held by his business to thecloud.

Every evening, the 80 employees at the property law firms offices in London and Guildford would back up the days conveyancing documents, searches, emails and other correspondence to a huge bank of on-siteservers.

Each case generates about 160 documents, he explains. Every time we created a document, we stored it. We needed to back up our data and keep it safe because it is incredibly sensitive information that includes bank details and identity checks. My number-one concern which literally kept me awake at night for years was whether that data was vulnerable to a ransomware attack.

Finally, after months of research and planning, in November last year, The Partnership migrated all archived and live case data to a cloudservice.

It was scary Ill make no bones about it, Ambrose admits. Although we had done all the tests, until youve actually moved this huge amount of data, you worry about whether its going towork.

The Partnership is one of a growing number of SMEs that have successfully moved their operations to the cloud. Another is Dakota Hotels. The luxury accommodation group needed a cost-effective cloud-based software solution that could be scaled up as the business grew. It also wanted to harness the potential of the cloud to help with the HR challenges that the pandemic had forced upon the hospitality sector. As an additional benefit, the company gained greater insights into its costs and commercial opportunities.

The time savings weve accrued by moving to the cloud have freed people up to focus on innovation, says the companys operations director, Andrew Ovenstone. This has enabled our finance professionals to move away from number-crunching and become valuecreators.

For businesses using simpler cloud applications, the primary driver should be functionality, followed by security, compliance, scalability andcost

All hotels under the Dakota brand compile their own profit-and-loss statements, which meant that a cloud-based solution would be an ideal solution to support multiple data entries. This has granted each hotel the autonomy to input data without compromising consolidation, reporting or intelligence at grouplevel.

For SMEs, there are several key factors to consider when contemplating a move to the cloud. The first of these is the issue of cost versus opportunity.

Cost matters for SMEs, but you also need to think about what moving to the cloud can enable for your business, says Dr Antonio Weiss, senior partner at The PSC, a consultancy that helps providers of public services with their digital transformations.

If you hold data and applications on your premises, you probably run quite a restricted service, says Weiss, whose book, The Practical Guide to Digital Transformation, was published in February. The cloud enables huge possibilities in terms of data processing and analysis. It also offers better security and improved performance for your customers and staff. So, while you should aim to keep costs low in any cloud transition, you need to focus on how it can make your business better and to ensure that you have a plan to capitalise onthis.

The second key factor to consider is flexibility. One of the challenges for The Partnership was to find a cloud provider that would store and register multiple versions of documents rather than providing a static record. This enables employees to return to the material and update it where necessary.

We looked at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, but found that they wouldnt work for us, Ambrose says. We needed a system that could cope better with changeable data, which is why we partnered withEgnyte.

The third consideration is the level of functionality required in the short, medium and long term. SMEs need to be realistic about what level of service and availability they are going to need, says Mairead OConnor, executive for cloud engineering at ANDDigital.

Public cloud platforms enable SMEs to occupy the same playing field as big, cash-rich corporations, she says. All companies have been granted access to technology such as machine-learning tools. Only recently, functionality of this sort would have been out of reach to all but the most well-funded multinationals.

But firms should not adopt such tech without first considering their strategic direction. Cloud transformations are complex and, unless they are executed properly, they can lead to serious operational inefficiencies and data leakage. Before parting with any money, CIOs and CEOs should take a step back and review their current businessmodel.

Ash Finnegan digital transformation officer at Conga, an enterprise cloud computing and data company, observes that a lot of SMEs have been rushing their digital transformations.

Regardless of their size, organisations need to complete a thorough assessment and understand where they are with regard to their digital maturity today, she says. This involves analysing their current operational model, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and establishing how they can better connect with their customers and servethem.

The fourth key factor to consider is the likely level of service and tech support required. Despite the hurdles involved, migration to the cloud can yield many benefits, as The Partnership and Dakota Hotels have discovered.

Using subscription cloud services eliminates the need to maintain and upgrade technology, which can be costly and time-consuming processes for SMEs. But it is vital to establish exactly how much support you expect from your cloud provider and to be realistic about your own IT abilities.

The provision of adequate tech support is key for smaller firms, stresses Charlie Dawson, marketing and channel director at cloud provider Imscad Global. There will be some SMEs with the resources to support their own cloud migration and provide ongoing support, butthey should ensure that the provider they choose offers a good level of support, including the ability to have issues resolved using in-person communication, hesays.

Security is the fifth major consideration. For Ambrose, his decision to use a cloud service was prompted by the ongoing challenge of protecting The Partnerships in-house servers. Yet price and performance are often the first considerations for many SMEs, even though a loss of data could have catastrophic ramifications.

While factors such as affordability and capacity are clearly fundamental, most cloud providers offer only the most basic security features, especially at the budget end of the spectrum, warns Trevor Morgan, product manager at data security specialist Comforte.

This simply wont be enough if your highly sensitive information on your firms finances, intellectual property and customers is destined for the cloud, hesays.

Concerns about regulatory compliance will come to the fore here, especially for businesses in industries that require very strict risk controls for example, defence, healthcare and financial services.

Each particular market will present different constraints, but companies operating in the same space may still have different appetites for risk, notes Dean Clark, chief technology officer at digital consultancy GFT Group. The ideal balance between security, compliance, cost and functionality will depend on the individual organisation.

SMEs should determine whether the solution they are considering has the right level of security in place. Two-factor authentication (2FA) should be a minimum standard, according to Lee Wrall, director at managed services provider Everything Tech.

Were seeing that some cloud solutions are putting 2FA into their future roadmap, but we believe it should already be there, he says. For more robust infrastructure requirements, wed recommend opting for bigger, more established solutions such as Microsoft or Amazon, as these provide features such as security, compliance and the ability to scale up as standard. For businesses using simpler cloud applications, the primary driver should be functionality, followed by security, compliance, scalability andcost.

Database requirements constitute the sixth and final key consideration. In the cloud, storage capacity is one of the measures that service providers use to charge for their offering. If you do not have significant volumes of data, the cloud may not provide value formoney.

For any company that needs some level of scale and availability, the cloud is usually the best option, says Andrew Oliver, senior director of product marketing at MariaDB, an open-source database provider. For a very small database with merely internal users, hosting in house might be more cost-effective if the company has the time and expertise and a careful plan for off-sitebackup.

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What SMEs should know when moving to the cloud - Raconteur

Tens of thousands of engineers, and staff, from Ukraine's once-booming tech industry have joined 500,000 Ukrainians fleeing across the border to safety, while many remain to volunteer, or trapped by martial law.

Tymofii Vlasov, a 33-year-old software engineer, faced a 12-hour drive along winding back roads to avoid a highway blocked with fellow refugees as he fled from the Russian militarys advance on his home Kyiv. Vlasov is just one of the thousands of Ukrainians who help keep the lights on for international tech companies but have now been forced to flee their homes.

Amazon, Lyft, Snap have all turned to Ukraine in recent years to hire engineers such as Vlasov, who tests and debugs code for San Mateo, California-based startup Totango. But the war has upended that, and now many tech companies are chartering buses and planes to get their staff to safety. Shares in EPAM Systems one of Ukraines biggest tech employers plunged 45.6% after the S&P 500 stock pulled its market guidance after warning investors of heightened uncertainties.

We have a significant presence of our engineering talent with around 14,000 people spread from around east to west [Ukraine] and its obvious the current events are impacting [us], says Arkadiy Dobkin, CEO and chairman of EPAM, which has an $11.8 billion market cap after its shares slumped 67% since the start of the year. A lot of people are continuing to work but a lot of people are also sitting in a bomb shelter.

The Newtown, Pennsylvania-based company says it had been evacuating staff away from the frontlines to western Ukraine but it was impossible for now to move some 6,000 staff stuck in Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, which was targeted by shelling on February 28. The two cities have in recent years become bustling tech hubs home to tens of thousands of engineers working for outsourcing companies like EPAM, local startups like face-swapping app Reface, and international tech giants.

EPAM has 14,000 staff in Ukraine and 18,000 more in Belarus and Russia, who build custom software for scores of S&P 500 companies. We will take care of our people as much as we can, says Dobkin, who is originally from Belarus.

EPAM is not the only tech company to have had to pivot from organizing code updates to escape lines for staff. Israeli website builder Wix had offered its 900 Ukrainian staff, along with their families, temporary relocation to Turkey earlier this month as tensions mounted.

About 600 members of the Wix staff were left in Ukraine when Russian forces invaded on February 24. Employees have been moving west with buses we chartered in advance or driving their own cars westwards towards Lviv, and the Polish border, says Nir Zohar, President & COO of Wix.

Zohar says Wix had a team at the Polish border waiting to meet staff before relocating them to Krakow, Poland, where the Nasdaq-listed company has offices. We help them with accommodation, supplies, blankets, baby food, and whatever they need because most of them have been traveling for 48 hours straight, says Zohar, adding volunteers from Wixs offices in Lithuania had driven over 500 miles to help.

The impact of the emergency evacuation of a fifth of Wixs engineering and customer support teams had been softened by contingency plans activated earlier to move key staff outside of Ukraine, says Zohar.

Lyft, Snap, and British startup Hopin are among tech companies that have also offered emergency funds and relocation to staff in Ukraine. The UN's refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates around half a million people have now fled Ukraine to neighboring countries since the start of Russias invasion.

Software companies, with data already secured in cloud servers, can move developers and laptops relatively easily even with Ukraines roads, and trains, choked but startups with an industrial component such as alarm and security device maker Ajax Systems face a bigger challenge. The Kyiv-based company has shipped its stock and parts across the border and was now building a new factory in Poland and in Ukraine, according to Aleksandr Konotopskyi, Ajax Systems CEO.

A two-month supply of components and finished products is being transported to the west of Ukraine and Poland right now, says Konotopskyi, adding that Ajax data was on AWS servers outside Ukraine. The priority today is the lives and safety of our employees. We are following the news carefully and relocating our teams to safe regions in Ukraine or Europe.

Not everyone has chosen to leave. Macpaw founder and CEO Oleksandr Kosovan, returned to Kyiv, and his new home in the basement of his office, after taking his family out of the country shortly before flights were suspended. I thought to myself, `How will I look into the eyes of my children if we lose this war if we lose our country? I will not be able to forgive myself, says Kosovan. I will do whatever we can to resist this aggressionIf Russia is a bear, we are like a swarm of bees.

Civilian volunteers have been handed weapons in Kyiv as Russian forces advanced on Ukraine's capital.

Leaving Ukraine has also not been an option for men eligible for military service since President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared martial law. Families are being broken apart, says Zohar. The men are not allowed to leave Ukraine so some of our male employees are sending their wives and kids. Female employees are crossing but are leaving husbands behind. Its heartbreaking, and it's our responsibility to help out.

Totango had offered its 15 staff relocation to Israel prior to Russias invasion, but many had chosen to remain in Ukraine, says Amit Bluman, Totango SVP of Engineering. We have been working together for four years and it has been super encouraging to see them handle this situationand some are going far and beyond helping with supplies, or volunteering with the army, or leaving their safe place to go Kharvic to help with first aid, says Bluman, adding that Totango continues to support its staff inside Ukraine. Hearing these things on your daily meetingI was overwhelmed.

After a journey that took twice as long as it should have, Vlasov is now sharing a crowded apartment with his brother, his sister-in-law, and her family, in his hometown of Odessa. The Black Sea port might be safe for now but it appears to be a key objective for Russia and now lies just over 100 miles from the frontline.

One of Vlasovs first tasks on arriving in Odessavolunteering for a local defense force. Vlasov joined long lines at the draft office that for now was only accepting those with active military experience. In Odessa, we have lots of volunteers I think everyone here is ready to fight. I will definitely fight because this is my city, he says.

Read more:
Russian Invasion Of Ukraine's 'Silicon Valley' Hits Tech Everywhere But Especially Inside The Stricken Country - Forbes