How to become Cloud Architect of the year

With just over two months to go, the Cloud Architect of the Year election is quickly approaching. Cloud Architects in the Netherlands (and beyond) are anticipating the award show on January 30th 2020 with a mix of enthusiasm and anxiousness. Will peers recognize the monumental achievements some have fought so hard to realize? Will the jury notice how the cloud journey of ACME Inc. was secured by an ingenuous and novel take on cloud security? And what about the Cloud Engineers that have to deal with the nitty gritty of everyday cloud implementations?

This year, we’ve chosen to open up nominations for three categories: the Cloud Architect, Cloud Engineer and the Cloud Security Architect. Below, we will briefly discuss which characteristics are important to get nominated and maybe even win.

The Cloud Architect

As we described in our booklet ‘The high performing Cloud Architect’, a truly effective Cloud Architect has a vast array of knowledge on topics ranging from legal requirements to stakeholder management and business needs. He or she combines this knowledge with a thorough familiarity with different cloud technologies. The successful Cloud Architect always aims to realize an well-oiled machine of human interaction and cloud technologies that propels a business forward.

Cloud Engineer

For the first time in this elections’ history, we’ve included the category of Cloud Engineer. Even though the role differs from that of a Cloud Architect and in fact can be broken into multiple roles, the Cloud Engineer is important for the success of any cloud migration. He or she may be acting as cloud software engineer, cloud security engineer, cloud systems engineer or DevOps engineer. For this election, we are looking for the individual who excelled in his or her role as cloud engineer and had a large impact on the Cloud project he or she was involved in.

Cloud Security Architect

Last but not least, the final category is that of the Cloud Security Architect. As anyone who has been involved in Cloud adoption projects will know, business owners, compliancy and others tend to worry about Cloud security a lot. The Cloud security Architect is indispensable in allaying these fears with tried and true technologies and intelligent designs. The Cloud Security Architect of 2020 is the one who is on top of all security concerns related to Cloud and leads and mentors his or her team in applying the appropriate technical controls on cloud.

Nominate your peer!

That’s it! These are the categories in which you can nominate your peers. Hopefully we’ve shed some light on the criteria and characteristics that are important to win. Nominate your peers now and don’t forget to claim your free ticket for the election night (and deep dive on cloud-native data lakes) if you have not done so already. See you there!