It's a brave new world. Many companies no longer store data on their own servers, using instead "cloud" service providers. Mobile device use is growing at an explosive pace. And these and other new technologies are presenting security challenges undreamt of just a few years ago.
Here's a rundown of the career potential and skills needed for success in cloud data, mobile and security technology.
Cloud and Data
The advent of cloud computing services has drastically lowered the barrier to entry for new tech companies to build and launch products. Friend.ly, a Mountain View, Calif., social networking company, doesn't have to worry about renting space for its Web servers or need 24-hour IT professionals on call in case the servers crash.
Amazon Web Services takes care of that for them -- until Amazon crashes, like it did in April. Though it didn't affect Friend.ly, the incident brought down the Web sites of startups like Quora and Reddit.
Small server crashes happen frequently says, Joachim De Lombaert, co-founder and CTO of Friend.ly. De Lombaert says he looks for engineers who are cognizant of the many ways that the cloud servers can fail and can create back-up plans. So if a particular feature of Friend.ly isn't available because of a small server crash, the company has to be ready with an alternate Web page that will make it to seem to the user that nothing is wrong.
Cloud computing is essentially the retrieval of data from multiple remote servers, also referred to as distributed systems. Retrieval isn't hard when the amount of data is small, but as the number of users grows from 1,000 to 100,000 to 1 million, it's increasingly complicated to retrieve data and deliver real time results to users.
That's why entrepreneurs like Dan Siroker, CEO of Optimizely, an A/B testing site, look for engineers with "big data" experience who are able to design products that anticipate and can handle mass volume from the get-go.
"What that requires of engineers isn't a specific language or syntax. It requires them to think about the problem and assume it's going to be a billion first," Siroker says. "Don't get it working for a hundred, because as soon as the hundred turns into a thousand, you're going to have a problem, and when the hundred million turns into a billion you have an even bigger problem."
Engineers who want to be able to distribute large amounts of data from multiple servers should get accustomed to working with NoSQL databases and Hadoop software, Siroker says.
Mobile
Total spend on apps and services will be $54.6 billion by 2015, according to Forrester Research. Android, iOS, and BlackBerry developers are in high demand as companies beef up their mobile offerings. But not all developers are created equal.
Follow-through is one distinction that Rand Arnold, director of software engineering for iOS at Peel Technologies, makes between candidates. It sounds like a trait that all employees should have, but it's crucial in mobile development, Arnold says, because the distance between building an app prototype and one that works for users and is devoid of bugs is many miles.
"I've had people who were great at coming up with an idea and expressing it, but just could never finish it by fixing all the little bugs," he says. "They take it to the 80% point, but can never get the last 20% done, and the last 20% takes most of the time."
This is especially important in mobile because apps are static, that is, they can't be updated instantaneously as problems arise. If there are bugs remaining in an app, they won't be fixed for a minimum of weeks, because that's how long it takes to get them approved and available at most app stores.
Peel CEO Thiru Arunachalam says that really great Android developers are hard to come by, both because the platform hasn't been available for as long as Apple's iOS has, and also because Apple has many of the fancier features, like animation, built into its operating system. "On Android, you have to build it from scratch," he says.
Job postings looking for Android developers on tech-jobs website Dice.com increased by 302% over the last year, comparing the first quarter of 2011 with the first quarter of 2010; iPhone postings were up 220% in the same period.
App developers have to think critically about what data to keep on the smartphone handset itself and what to put in the cloud. It's a trade-off, Arnold says, because the data -- say, video or photos -- that is stored in the cloud can't be accessed as quickly. But if everything is stored on the handset, then the entire app will work slowly.
"You have to figure out what to save and what to throw away," Arnold says. "If you're not careful, your app is going to be sluggish and slow, and no one's going to use it."
Security
The recent spate of security breaches everywhere from Sony to the International Monetary Fund has highlighted the vulnerability of personal and financial information on the Internet. Security experts say that the biggest areas for growth within cyber security are protecting mobile devices and the cloud servers that store vast amounts of data.
Deep knowledge of the different mobile operating systems -- Android, iOS, Blackberry -- is a must for mobile security engineers, says Sanjay Beri, vice president and general manager at Juniper Networks.
"You need to know what their architecture is, what their workflow is, how they perform updates, and the marketplace in which they live and get applications so you can understand the threat vectors and be proactive rather than reactive," says Beri.
Because mobile devices by their nature have only a limited amount of battery life, engineers have to develop software that can protect and patch threats efficiently and without draining the device's battery. The choice is often between using a "signature" approach--which is a one-off patching of a security hole that consumes less energy -- and a "heuristic" approach, which is a more comprehensive scan of security threats based on threat patterns.
Across all areas of security, dogged research is required to understand the evolving techniques that hackers use. The best way to do that is hack yourself--without causing harm. Security companies hire researchers with Ethical Hacker certification. Symantec, for example, in the course of research, recently found security holes in Facebook that gave advertisers access to users' personal information.
Security research candidates typically have experience with networking, machine learning, deep systems, and data analysis, said Joe Pasqua, vice president of research at Symantec.
Cloud security requires expertise in network devices and Internet Protocol Suite, sometimes called TCP/IP. Engineers also need to understand the back-end applications that run cloud server infrastructure, like ISQL databases and JBoss Application Servers, Beri says.
Another security challenge for cloud service providers is to prevent one customer from accessing another customer's data, so engineers have to be conversant with Micosoft's Active Directory, authentication and Security Assertion Markup Language (SML), Beri says.
Write to Joseph Walker
