[ddk632]

@_ryan_

Very good points; yes I do realize it's not just for small businesses. I concede that what I wrote was oversimplified. And yes, I am aware of the movement towards cloud based apps like Office 365, etc., though from a Cloud Architect career perspective I think that the focus is more hardware and virtualization software oriented than software oriented.

I am sure there is overlap in small amounts to some degree. In general though, taking advantage of, for example, Azure SQL and Office 365 integration, falls squarely into software engineering realm.

@Dek25ive

Cool man, it's a great field to get into. IT is growing, and there is lots of opportunity for new entry, unlike say Law, right now. Especially when you've already been in some other part of the field, since you have knowledge and experience on your side above and beyond the average fresh college grad.

I will preface my comments by saying, I am in the software side of things, so I can't give you direct experience in the infrastructure side of things; I also have never taken a cert or college class in my life, so I can't tell you if they're helpful - I can only say that lack of same has never hindered me in my career and/or business.

My commentary is purposely general, but written from a software guy's perspective; hopefully you find it useful in some way.

Also it seems like if you're a Satellite Communications Engineer working overseas, you're not looking to jump into some junior network admin position as average salaries from what I see are pretty decent already in what you currently do. It also means you already have some good grasp on network protocols and how data moves, analysis, etc. I think it's a decent foundation/starting point.

I am not sure why you mentioned marketing though, as I don't consider that IT at all and a marketing degree doesn't seem to be congruent with your current IT experience. I can tell you that if you want a degree to compliment your work and career in any IT field, it should be a CS degree, period. Or in more rare cases, advanced mathematics degrees for more specialized roles, though this is usually in software, not hardware, side of things.

Here is what I can say definitively, to add on top of the already good commentary provided by @_ryan_:

In our field, information technology, the one single most important quality of anyone is Knowing Your Shit(tm).

The second one, right behind #1, is stay on top of new technology constantly.

Believe it or not, there are many people who do not adhere to the above principles who are gainfully employed in IT.

They got in at some point, got stuck in some job, and are today still working on 10 year old technology and can't tell you how it actually does what it does. While that guy has a job, he is not very marketable and has probably reached a plateau of income that will never increase except with inflation. Don't be that guy.

The rest, including degrees and certifications are nice and often useful fluff that adds to those two points. Knowing your shit, and staying on top of new industry standards, practices, technologies, components, and the like, is what gives you value in the market in any IT field, provided you have recent experience with at least the most current widely adopted technologies used in the market. This has been my experience.

That means, know the ins and outs of the low level stuff involved in computing in general. Know what is under the hood (not down to the electronic level, but down to the level where you have a fundamental knowledge of how systems work, how individual components work, how various hardware communication works in computing (you already know this), etc., what are the "weakest links," how different components affect systems at large, which components are available and popular for certain functions, their pros and cons, etc.

To accomplish this, read blogs of industry insiders, frequent tech sites, attend conferences, and similar. There is no shortage of really, really, really smart people who share their knowledge in blogs and articles about every nook and cranny of the technologies that they work with. Often times, these are the same people who are involved in building and developing those technologies. For example, as a C# developer, you might be following members of the team who write c# itself to stay on top of developments. Many of those guys have blogs and are active in the community.

Just like as a software architect, one should be aware of the right tool for the job, as they say, and is expected to know, have experience with, and recommend as well as implement specific technologies into the creation of software systems based on the needs, requirements, analysis, and expectations, so is the cloud architect expected to know and do these things on the infrastructure side.

These principles of knowing and fundamentally understanding the building blocks of systems, the protocols of communication amongst and within systems, are applicable to both hardware and software systems alike.

This is especially important today when so much technology is provided to dumb down things. Especially in software. So many "developers" cannot even explain how AJAX (a marketing term of sorts in itself, btw, as the technology predates the term by more than half a decade) actually works, and what happens, when, how, and via what underlying technology, on the server and the client; or they don't truly grasp the difference in stateless nature of web applications and the stateful nature of desktop software. I've worked with that guy, and trust me, don't be that guy.

(I realize the above may not apply to you since you're not getting into software or web development, but I hope the analogy resonates and I am sure there is a hardware equivalent.)

I think that virtualization / cloud is huge right now and honestly, in the next 10 years I see this field maturing just as software has matured over the past decade. We now have such sophisticated frameworks available, that new developers can write powerful apps in managed code, and they will run on multiple platforms after being compiled directly from bytecode on a device and run as fast as a native app.

That's great for new devs joining the ranks, but the true genius is on the teams who worked to make this happen in the first place. Such opportunities to work on new more advanced technologies and systems, both in software and in hardware, will be, I think, plentiful in the coming decade. I have no intention of going to a different field.

This field is not going anywhere and with the proliferation of IT use for nearly every facet of business as well as personal consumption, coupled with the high rate of relatively useless graduates whose ramp up time to get into mid level positions in their field is high, it's safe to say that the field is in no danger of being over saturated. This is provided you stand above that crowd, by having advanced knowledge of how it all works. This is accomplished by Knowing Your Shit(tm).