CompTIA Offers Vendor-Neutral Cloud Computing Certification

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In the new Wild West of cloud computing, many players — vendors and service providers of all stripes — are scrambling to establish credibility. CompTIA’s new certification may play a role in this process.

(This article, written by Susan Hall, was originally posted in the Charting Your IT Career blog at ITBusinessEdge.)

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CompTIA’s cloud computing certification, which my colleague Don Tennant wrote about last January, has finally become a reality. Rick Bauer, director of research and development for skills certification at the industry trade association, told me that one of the goals of the certification was to get everyone on the same page.

… You had some folks who knew about technology and business people trying to leverage it, managed service providers in the cloud ecosystem … What we assumed people across the desk knew about cloud was pretty uneven and in some cases even a black box …

Though various vendors have created cloud certifications based on their specific hardware — HP being the latest — CompTIA set out to create a vendor-neutral certification and in the process, found ITpreneurs working on the same thing in Europe. They joined forces and spent about half the year testing the result, known as Cloud Essentials, in companies such as ING Europe, VMware and Rackspace and others. Bauer says it’s probably the most thoroughly tested certification CompTIA has ever produced.

Bauer described the result this way:

This is an entry-level certification. It’s not for the data center manager who’s running Microsoft’s Hyper-V or ESX stuff out of VMware … It’s not a deep dive into the technical stuff the way, say, our A+ credential is for PC techs or our soon-to-be-released Storage+ credential is. This is a foundational certification …

Read the rest about CompTIA’s Cloud Computing certification at ITBusinessEdge.