Cloud computing skills continue to be in high demand – and new figures from PayScale reveal that AT&T, General Electric and Oracle provide the best remuneration for top performers.
The figures, first reported by Forbes, cover a variety of metrics, from employers, to different roles, to company size and years’ experience, with the data coming from more than 1000 US-based respondents in each case.
If you want to make the most money from your cloudy career, then enterprise IT architect, with a median salary of $138,051, just pips senior solutions architect, with $132,092, as the role with the best remuneration. Solutions architect ($122,593), IT architect ($120,811) and senior systems engineer ($106,170) also broke the six-figure barrier, compared with DevOps engineer ($97,135) and software engineer ($95,962).
When it came to specific companies, AT&T offers almost a quarter of a million dollars ($248,323) for their most experienced roles, with GE and Oracle the only others to offer more than $200k. Comparing against the salary data for the four hypervisor cloud infrastructure vendors, IBM came out with a top salary of almost $175k, with Microsoft ($166k) and Amazon ($164k) close behind and Google – albeit with less data to work from – at $115k.
Perhaps not surprisingly, larger organisations pay more, although the increments do not entirely match. Organisations with fewer than 600 employees will pay below $116k on average, however the salaries – based on more than 100 figures – do not see a noticeable pattern (2000-4999 employees, $124,059, 5000-19999, $123,569) until the largest category, enterprises with more than 50,000 employees, whose average salary is $129,291.
These figures may add colour to a UK study released earlier this month by IT resourcing provider Experis, who warned that while the number of cloud vacancies almost doubled – at a 97.73% increase – year on year, salaries for permanent roles only went up 2.7% on average.
The reasoning, Experis argued, was that as roles for companies maintaining, optimising and enhancing their existing cloud platforms proliferated, less specialised skills were needed for them, making them easier to fill and pay growth to stumble accordingly.
As a result, getting the best certifications is vital to forging a successful cloud career. Writing for this publication earlier this year, Alex Bennett, of IT training school Firebrand Training, put down six of the most sought-after specifications in the industry, from AWS, to Microsoft, as well as the (ISC)2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) certification.
You can take a look at the full data here.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their Cyber Security & Cloud use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.
