Earlier this week I attended a panel discussion at Mira Costa Community College. The panel discussion centered upon what the industry representatives thought we should be teaching. Below is a subsequent email discussion I had with one of the industry representatives. I think it would interest CIN members. I'd appreciate your feedback.
Email from Steve Linthicum (CCCCO) to William Figueroa (Viasat)
I wanted to talk about concerns I have with community colleges continuing to focus on hardware and a belief I have that it probably makes sense to move away from the hardware courses and focus on cloud computing. That belief is contained in an
article I wrote that was published last month by Certification Magazine (link provided above).
As noted in the article, I'm "retiring" on June 30th from the California community college system. Rick Cassoni has asked that I teach for Mira Costa (specifically their Cisco CCNA class and possibly their Security+ related class), something I cannot do until the Spring 2021 because of a requirement to take 6 months off. Based upon where I believe things are headed, I'm not sure students will achieve a ROI (return on instruction) benefit from taking the Cisco line of courses that are focused on its router and switch line of products. A stronger benefit in my opinion would be focusing on gaining an understanding of cloud computing, with a focus on AWS and Azure. That is a direction I'm focused on as evidenced in my
recent blog postings.
I'd appreciate your thoughts.
Steve
Response from Wilson Figueroa
I would generally agree with those statements, but there are some things to keep in mind.
- We do design equipment that is self-contained and requires the use of routers and switches, but that is much less today.
- I think students need to have a very good understanding of TCP / IP and protocols and how that all works.
- If they need Cisco or Juniper Certs – those are offered by schools and online.
We are finding that multi-cloud is not only a nice to have, but a need to have.
- The different cloud providers appear to be specializing in different things and you now choose the one that has the best tools for your use case.
- We have our own private cloud using Rackspace and enterprise equipment, plus we use Azure, AWS, and GCP.
- There are many security arguments for multi-cloud – like eliminating vendor lock-in, the ability to easily move containerized apps to different cloud providers, supporting different regions around the world, better support for real-time work (like Kubernetes with Google cloud).
What is similar is that each cloud provider has a shared security model. Students should be taught what that means, how you set up security services and how you monitor those. For example, how do you look and interpret CloudWatch and CloudTrail logs in addition to your private cloud and enterprise logs.
Also, CC is now shifting to things like Lambda Function (Serverless) and we already run what are called immutable containers. The tools, SecDevOps (or DevSecOps), DevOps and cloud tools are growing at a fast pace. I even suspect that Quantum Computers will be time-shared and you will access those over the cloud.
So, I think it is critical to teach students to de-emphasize the hardware and learn the way of the cloud because it will continue to grow in breadth (cloud services and tools), tools and use for everyone as today companies want to focus on their platform as opposed to the smaller view of their products.
Thanks ~Wilson
