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Cloud-Sourcing's Long-Term Impact On IT Careers
snydeq writes "InfoWorld provides a reality check on the impact cloud computing will have on IT jobs, the overall effects of which will likely resemble those of outsourcing, automation, and utility computing — in other words, a movement away from the nuts and bolts of technology toward the business end of the organization. This shift from 'blue-collar IT to white-collar IT' will be accompanied by greater demand for IT pros experienced with virtualization and Web scale-out deployments, even among midlevel organizations, and greater emphasis on SaaS integration among in-house development teams, analysts say. And though the large-scale impact of 'cloud-sourcing' is likely a decade away, those not versed in vendor contract management, cloud integration, analytics, and RIA and mobile development may find themselves pushed toward the less technical jobs to come, those that will require days full of conference calls and putting out fires caused by doing business in the cloud."
and for the rest of us; business as normal. Got it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
While "Cloud" computing is here to stay, it is a while off, and opens interesting problems with different legal requirements caused by regulations. How does SOX integrate with Cloud computing. As it stands currently, it really doesn't because there is a lack, or at least perceived lack of accountability. While I can agree that we will see more widespread rollouts in the next ten years, for those working at publicly traded companies or in Health Care, you can expect to see a lot of systems still in house, albeit virtualized and distributed, rather than off site. All this article really does, is reiterate the importance for any IT professional to stay current or move into management.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
I would like to point out that this article was written by Eric Knorr. Editor in Chief at Infosuck... I mean Infoworld. I am a 40 year old IT Director. I have been at this for 20 years. As far as I can remember, every place I've been, Infoworld usually is sitting in the lobby or somewhere in the IT magazine rack. It's one of the rags that CIOs like to have up front to show they are "in touch".
I remember when Bob Metcalfe was EIC, and when they sued Mark Stephens over the use of the pen name Robert X. Cringley.
I can't remember anything, any major direction, they were well informed or ahead of the curve on. Not one. I remember the Lotus Notes vs. Microsoft Exchange wars, I can't ever remember thinking 'Wow, Infoworld is really on top of this trend.' Can you?
As such, I wouldn't even read that claptrap about SaaS. It's fodder for CIO types to talk to CEO types about. Truth is, SaaS is evolutionary, not revolutionary. That's been true for everything in the past 20 years of computing.
The reality check implies practical experience. The more the better. Things don't always work out the way you expect.
There is a slow progression to that point. Looking back 10 or 20 years ago today there have been significant advancements in technology and many game-changing technologies that never became mainstream. Even virtualisation has been held back by the 'needs' of the small and medium business - most have no need for it. The cloud will start in large enterprises and maybe trickle down to small businesses in some form or another, but we'll still need many IT techs at all levels of knowledge and organisation.
As long as businesses hold onto legacy software, advancement will be kept at a reasonable maximum. We still have accounting software that is 25 years old. Can we put that in the "Cloud"? Perhaps cloud computing or grid (like electricity utility) is where we are headed, but the jobs that is displaces will be filled in the "Cloud Industry".
I try to keep my feet wet in all aspects of IT regardless of the specific duties I'm performing at a job - this way I can at least have a taste for what I enjoy, what I'm capable of (programming, say) or where I might like to be in 10 years. As trends pick up, I'll devote more time to the fields which may have a better payoff in not only my personal life, but my professional life. I have dabbled enough in virtualisation to become proficient, but I am no expert - mainly because I, or the company I am at, have little to no use for it at the moment, but I realize the possibility my next job may have for it.
What the Industry sometimes fails to realize is that it is IT people who make or break the products. From the majority of /, readers responses to all these Cloud Computing posts, the main concerns are reliability and security. Reliability may be solved soon, but I feel security will always be a neverending list of crackers and incompetence on the part of the cloud utility. Too many stories of losing usb keys, laptops, security passes, passwords, etc, on the part of large "no fail" companies that should know better. Most businesses will be very very adverse to giving up control of their data, and somehow I don't see that ever changing, even when they claim the risk is almost 0%.
And I say that as a sysadmin myself.
There are thousands of businesses around the world that are just large enough to need a couple of full-time IT people of some description. These businesses account for a lot of IT jobs. If you actually crunch the numbers, the huge companies of this world don't employ that many people as a percentage of the working population.
SaaS allows a business to grow much larger before it needs a full-time IT presence than was previously possible - all those crappy little applications (of which there are thousands) that IT technicians, sysadmins etc. got to know backwards and inside out and were next to useless in their next job are going the way of the dodo. PC so full of viruses and spyware it's virtually unusable? Considering the amount of money you'll pay per month for a full-time member of staff, it may well be cheaper to keep a couple of spares in the cupboard and just bin it when you hit trouble.
This is great for the business - they can get more done for less money. Not so much for the sysadmin.
Blue will shift to white... until white shifts back to blue. And all jobs will eventually be outsourced or replaced by scripts... About the time you decide to get a mortgage in a house you can't afford...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Look at how nicely Google Docs and the Cloud worked for Twatter.... It's to easy for hackers and the infrastructure just is there yet. Some apps it makes sense for but the current lemming bumrush for the cloud will start to lessen once the rain storms begin.
I don't think anyone, anywhere, ever, has considered an IT worker 'blue collar'.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
1) Flexibility: difficult to mold SaaS solution to your specific business operations.
2) Reliability: requiring a connection to the internet adds an additional point of failure.
3) Speed: easy to get 40mbps internally. Internet connect is more likely to be 1.5mbps split 50 ways.
4) Cost: from what I have seen, SaaS is not especially cheap.
5) Security: debatable.
6) Vendor-lockin: if you need something changed on the server side, you only have one choice for the developers.
I don't really know, and I suppose a lot of it is situational, but I am not certain that that is going to take over the world any time soon.
And how do you connect to it? I hate this idiotic world view that we all magically plug into the cloud and the data mystically appears in front of our eyeballs.
Last time I checked, the cloud holds the data... it doesn't get us to the cloud, nor does it process the data (well, in some cases, maybe).
They're all unknowingly implying that we're going to plug into some matrix style knowledge bank.
And if that really is the case, I guess my IT job will shift to cleaning those metal brain plugs.
With the lame t-shirts i see around here I reckon most IT workers are NO-Collar workers.
Got root?
Maybe Vannevar Bush's prediction of giant electronic brains wasn't so far fetched?? It just is showing up in a different form from the giant skyscraper towers he predicted. It seems like the progression towards centralized computer a la mainframes is trying to make its way back.
What would have been interesting to see is the stats to back this up.
Break it down to size of business and the number of resources dedicated to the Cloud Sourcing across time. (Theres that damn "Cloud" word yet again)
I would just about bet that less than 5% of small and mid size businesses dont even know what the hell Could Sourcing is, let alone are using it.
Now look at the comparison of employees in small and mid size business compared to Lage corps and I bet it would make this article disappear!
What jobs this terrible economy isn't going to take, cloud computing is going take. Oh no, the sky is falling, the sky is falling.
I can't help you, no one can help you.
What a freakin claptrap article.
Cloud computing spending is going to increase from 12 billion to 46 billion in the next 3 years and there problably won't be any large scale movements to cloud for another 10 years. (From the FTA).
Do they really think they have a handle on what the hell is going to happen in the next 10 years? So much so that we should panic now. I think that there are some other things which may have a bigger impact on IT jobs in the near future.
Wish I had a job where I could sit down and make up shit about technology industry, write it down and then call it a day.
.. gray collar, because much of I.T. lies in this fuzzy area between blue and white collar job descriptions.
On one hand, you need to have education and intelligence above what's typically needed for a "blue collar" job. (I realize there are plenty of jobs, like various areas of construction, where one needs to use their brain, have some math skills, etc. etc. But they probably re-use the same basic set of skills for years, as long as they specialize in the same job, like flooring installation, or drywalling, or ??) With I.T., everything changes regularly -- if for no other reason, simply because companies need excuses to keep reselling people the same items they already bought 2 or 3 years earlier. Also, the fact that I.T. workers usually work in climate-controlled office environments compares to the norm for a "white collar" position. All in all, I.T. workers are paid for their knowledge more than for their physical labor.
On the other hand, like a "blue collar" job, I.T. workers usually get stuck doing everything from cleaning dust and dirt out of the insides of workstations to crawling under tables and desks, along dirty floors, and climbing ladders to reach drop ceilings or duct-work, to get network cabling run. They may spend a good part of a workday un-boxing new systems, carrying them around to their destinations, and hooking up cables - plus carting off the old ones. They may be asked to clear printer jams, or go out on a shop floor in a factory environment, and disassemble equipment that has a computer board and processor at the heart of it (maybe even to fix an issue as simple as the CMOS battery having gone dead, so the BIOS no longer holds settings).
The humans were lined up
"What do you do?"
"Im a cloud..." *zap* he falls dead from a robot laser
"What do you do?"
"Im a web..." *zap* he falls dead from a robot laser
"What do you do?"
"Im the chief inform...." *zap* he falls dead
"What do you do?"
"Im the tech who fixes your laser, I see you're busy downsizing the IT department... I'm taking an early lunch, k? Save me the copy girl, she's kind of hot"
Software for consumers is mostly Consumer Products which is a part of the industry that doesn't employ that many IT professionals.
The vast majority (by far) of IT professionals works in IT Services and in-house software development units, both of which are pretty much all about custom enterprise applications development and integration.
The other bit of the industry left (IT Corporate Products) is again all about corporate applications development and integration (which while mostly product oriented still includes a lot of product customization work)
Come to think of it, in my whole career in IT (12 years, 3 countries in Europe) I have never even met anyone which exclusively worked in consumer products.
This is not at all illogical:
- Companies have all sorts of strange and complex needs in many different domains, are must less prone to adjust their internal processes to the software and have the monetary means to pay to have IT professional (either in house or contracted) to create and/or adjust software to match those companies' internal processes.
Consumers on the other hand have a much narrower range of needs and are much more likely to just accept and follow the way their software makes them do things (which is why, for example, cross-integration between consumer products from different companies is almost nonexistent except if one is dominant in a market).
Adding cloud computing to a statement about the status of the industry for the past 15 years and calling if a forecast is neither a forecast nor news.
Because, of course, once we're all in the cloud, computers won't crash any more, LANs will just magically build themselves and the Internet will never go down.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I miss the "unprecedented evile" guy.
When the complexity of IT systems plateaus, becomes commoditized, then IT staff will indeed experience some fundamental shifts. As it is now, for every system that is commoditized, two or three more have increased in complexity.
There is more to SAAS and Cloud computing than the technical aspect. People, in general, are averse to change, and introducing another technology into the Peter Principle must be factored in as well. As our cultures become more complex and risk-averse, that is more enhanced, meaning that there has to be a very tangible REASON to change that is worth the upsetting of the status quo.
So for the short term, only early adopters are going to dip their toes in this water, by putting hot-swap sites on a cloud (though the reliability of the cloud service still needs some upgrading). The mid-term will see server hosting on the cloud, using the same applications and processes they would have anyway. Only when SAAS can be presented as a viable economic model to the companies paying for it will they look at it.
I know some of the guys at Amazon who are working on this. Without giving any secrets away, there are some technical and security issues that will take some re-architecture to overcome before client/server software could be reliably and easily hosted there. Amazon moves as quickly as anyplace in resolving such things, but it will take some time.
New name, but same-old same-old.
The real danger here is Billy D. Williams selling you out to the emperor and his tall, dark lackey with the cape. Only this time they will be water-boarding Chewbacca, and Han Solo will be trapped by a lengthy and expensive Carbonite data protection contract.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
It's ignorant to think that the future will all run on VMs, clouds, moonbeams and sunshine. All of that has to run on physical equipment somewhere. There is no such thing as something that exists 100% in the ether. It has to reside somewhere. These are physical ones and zeros we're talking about here.
With it residing somewhere, there has to be someone to design, build and maintain that equipment.
Also when companies see how big of a dip the performance of their critical apps take when they migrate to VMS, I can see a shift back to the racks and racks of servers.
Another Infoworld Fail.
Yours Truely,
Devil's Advocate
The game.
Cloud computing, despite being, IMO still largely a buzzword, is not about to spell the doom of the IT profession.
Because when this cataclysmic event occurs, and thousands of techs are downsized, cloud computing will step right in to unbox and set up the computers. It will step right in and build the server racks, run the cabling, configure the LAN settings, create VPN's, manage the thousands of inane and trivial tickets that nonetheless require physical presence to fix.
It will also apparently make sure that nothing ever crashes. And what about redundancy? When the ISP has a meltdown, or a blackout happens and the net is unavailable, will the intranet cloud be sufficient without enough onsite support?
Please. This article is just FUD. IT techs will be needed, as always.
I would not want to be working in IT at Liquid Motors right now. You can blame their problems on them or on the feds, but either way, they're in deep yogurt.
We have pretty much come full circle in concept. ( for those that remember the old days where everything was processed out on the big iron )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, you dump your entire Data Center in favor of Cloud computing, you embrace it all. Webmail, apps, collaboration services.
And then that fateful day comes when the Cloud is suddenly 404, and even your trifecta of Internet pipes isn't helping you get to your data.
C'mon, give me a break. People absofuckinglutely freak out when Gmail has a hiccup, and that is but ONE service needed in business today.
Nevermind the Security aspects of data in the cloud with Government buying and bailing their way into Corporate America boardrooms.
I call bullshit. Got about as much chance of "managing" the CEOs personal thumb drive via your home computer.
What cloud computing will do is to erase the advantage that one company has over their competitors. Take a company who has a 'better' business process and has built their in-house IT systems around it. Now, have them move to a cloud solution. The first things that must go are their custom data models and algorithms. Companies re-engineer themselves to fit OTS applications much more often than they customize the apps to fit the business. The next thing to go wil be their in-house development staff. No sense in keeping them around when nothing is left to be written that is specific to their company. Next, the executives who have domain knowledge specific to that companies' core processes can go. Since everyone in the industry (or across many) use the same processes, why pay big salaries when the supply of suitable talent is much larger.
So tell me: Why should I do business with your company? What do you do that your competitors don't? I mean, the cheap ones, in India or China.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm already planning my next career: career re-training!
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
[...] a term selling to the upper management above IT who have no idea what it means.
Nobody knows what it means. It is not as if there is a clear undisputed definition of the term "Cloud Computing". And lots of people pretend to be absolutely clear about what it exactly means.
Same goes for SOA, ESB, MDA, Architect, Architecture, Analyst,...
IT can get as business-like as it wants, but I want to see a large company *try* and axe the desktop/PC tech teams. Because we all know that Windows Vista is the first operating system that can fix itself...
The only people that suffer from these vertical moves are those at the lowest ends of the totem pole (i.e. help desk). Techs and admins were needed when computers were the size of small datacenters. Techs and admins were needed when the first desktop PCs became big. Techs and admins are still needed today, and will probably be needed tomorrow too.
Ick.. I'm a sysadmin and if I had to do that stuff (crawling along dirty floors) I'd quit.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
by David F. Noble.
The point of the book is that the post-WWII industrial landscape was not shaped by efficiency or technical concerns (both of which would have been better served by letting people who knew what they were doing run the factories,) but by the prejudices and political goals of factory managers, who were just as pointy-haired back in the day.
The same thing is happening today in IT. Managers view themselves as being somehow under the thumb of any employee that they cannot completely dominate, so they try to deskill their labor force as much as they can, regardless of whether this is actually more efficient or even profitable.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
...like the whole 'what will life be like without Mainframes' discussion of ten years ago.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Agreed. I think the definition above is a pretty limited view of what "IT workers" defines. There's a lot more going on in the industry.
This signature would be better if I was creative.
If we're following this logic, then it really depends on the job function. Personally, I think that the typical desktop tech is veering closer to a blue-collar position as computers increasingly become low-priced commodity items. We're already at the point where people can land "PC tech" and even sysadmin jobs if they simply get certificates from specialized trade schools. This is the same process that mechanics, plumbers and electricians can follow to get farther along in their career paths.
That's not to say that these vocations are poorly paid, though! Have you seen the prices plumbers command for simple work? God forbid if I didn't know how to change my toilet bowl; they'd gut my wallet! (Pun intended.) They're respected less than the lawyers and doctors of the world, but some of them can make just as much.
However, I think that jobs "higher" on the IT scale still demand a college degree simply for company executives to make their companies look good, even though the general responsibilities these positions required can literally be learned on the job. You don't need to be a computer science graduate from NYU to know how to use dcpromo or learn how to maintain some C++ projects, for example, but bigger, more reputable, companies and boutique hedge funds/investment banks around here require that for server admins, software developers and such.
This is partially the reason why I'm not too fond of the college model as it stands today. A lot of the goals that us college students are supposedly working for can be learned on-the-job, and are most definitely not required to graduate to management and executive positions. But that rant's for another post.
Ick.. I'm a sysadmin and if I had to do that stuff (crawling along dirty floors) I'd quit.
I remember working in Operations and installing Change Controls one day and then pulling floor tiles and running cables in the data center the next. Not to mention having to help lift 100 lbs disk storage arrays to be rack mounted.
And yes, occasionally our asshole manager told us to go "tidy up the machine room", which meant relabelling machines, picking up papers and generally being a janitor. Happily, they never told us to dust, as even they probably realized that we'd cause the HVAC to explode if we released that much dust at once.
All this at 50-70 dollars an hour. I definitely felt more than a little blue collar on some days. You do what you need to in order to make your money, until you can go somewhere else. Now, they don't even let me in the data center without an escort. I've been promoted to the rank of "can't be trusted in the data center". Someday, I may be promoted to "can't be trusted to log into servers"... I mean "technical management".
...except change out "cloud-sourceing" for "Fourth-Generation Languages", and it could have been written in 1985.
Alas, "The Business End" resolutely REFUSES to let their IT be easy-to-make and easy-to-use; they always want "more power" even if it is illusory.
Look at the web: nothing could be simpler and hand more control over document production and dissemination than HTML assisted by a basic editor (the early ones were far simpler than word processors) and, say WinSCP to drag files up to a series of Unix directories on your Apache server. Problem solved, right? Word Processing could wither away.
But, no, no, they wanted control over the page appearance rather than the web concept of just defining the information and letting the web browser worry about presentation. They wanted every kind of embedded media - as proprietary as possible (just look at a common video format being evicted from HTML5) - and embedded programs in Java, JavaScript, Flash, PDF. And "The Business" eagerly grabbed each new development and ran with it, complicating the browser and server at every turn.
Now only expensive experts can possibly produce a web site that a large organization would allow under their URL.
Trust me on this: they'll find a way to make cloud-sourced solutions expensive and impenetrably complicated for all but those who spend 40 hours a week "keeping up" with the latest and learning the fine tweaks.
The Business' Reach Must Exceed Its Grasp, Else What is IT For? ...sorry. To put it in Business terms: you can have the exact same cloud-sourced solution as everybody else for nearly free. Or you can gain competitive advantage on all the opponents who believe that by paying the usual 5-6% of corporate budget to an IT department to squeeze more functionality out of it. They will always do so, as surely as a Department of "Defence" will always seek to have bigger weapons that the other guys, regardless of the technological base that both opponents start from.
I hate these sweeping assumptions that all programming is for websites or distributable business apps.
Believe it or not, operating systems, embedded systems, firmware, games, scientific apps, engineering apps, etc etc don't write themselves.
This is the thing about the Matrix that I kept thinking about when watching the movie. No whistling IT person (or even robot IT person) cleaning the contacts on the killer robots...
Somebody, somewhere, has to do the work.
I find it unbelievable how things have made full circle in 12 years time.
Between 1997 and 2000 I worked as a programmer for two companies, using COBOL on WANG VS. The first one was in a small transport firm (~20 employees), and my main task was writing software for supporting the business. I also had to support the PC's, but that was strictly bare minimum. As a programmer, it was my task to know the business and be able to write software which helped the owner leverage DP to get more income or manage his resources better.
The second one was a small bank (~800 employees, programming staff included). I think there must have been around 50 programmers, but there were only three or four people doing what is now called IT : supporting PC's, administrating the WANG VS platform. They also had access to mainframes, but these where leased, so the support people there where from Honeywell.
So, in the last 12 years, people who do not know anything about programming, and thus do not know to add value to the business, have been steadily creeping into companies in order to provide all kinds of support, or rather babysitting systems, so that the people who do the real work can do their job. Decrementing this workforce is good, because it makes it possible to hire programmers and analysts to implement things not only for helping people do their job, but helping people do their job better.
I rather talk about DP than about IT, because it is DP which is able to add value to a business, due to storing, processing and retrieval of data.
In 1987, someone told me that Wordstar, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase III (don't remember if the plus version existed then) will make programmers redundant.
X is the unknown. Spurt is a drip under pressure. Expert is an unknown drop under pressure.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
On the one hand, of course businesses who run more than one server have or will virtualize them. This will save some staff time, what with fewer boxes. It's trading hardware complexity for software complexity, but it's a good trade.
But then, do you want to host your virtualized servers on "the cloud"? Totally separate question. Yes, it's easier to move a virtualized server off to the cloud. But why do you want to? To save on hardware maintenance costs? Really? You've still got computers in your office, right? You're not just running dumb terminals on the cloud? So you've got somebody to maintain them. What's the extra overhead in having them watch two more boxes, those being your main virtual server host (redundant power, RAID, etc. - a real server), and a hot backup? Say your total staff is only 6, it's a choice between maintaining just their six workstations (and switches, printers ...), or that + 2 servers. How often will those two servers be the proverbial straw to the camel's back? How are they more trouble or expense than all that's required to contract out to a cloud vendor?
That's presuming you've still got someone responsible for configuring your stuff within the virtualized servers. A lot of the cloud PR presumes that you can somehow dump that staff and just stick together a bunch of predefined, generic pieces. To the degree that works, what differentiates your business? How do you avoid always being slower and less capable than someone basing their business on a more customized solution? If your business is something anybody can set up with a few standard components on the cloud, and it's at all a viable business, you'll soon have so many competitors doing the same thing that the profit will be sucked out of it for all of you. Maybe you want to play in that space. Looks like a sucker's bet though.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Bill? Is that you?
how can one be respected less then a lawyer, i regularly lie about atending law school in public gatherings i would never do that about machinic or plumbing training.
Things change.
Undeniably.
Computing will become more utility like. Adapt or die.
Oh, I hope not. That would be terrible. That would be vendor lock-in of the very worst kind. Assuming all vendors agreed on a standard (not foreseeable), none of them would follow it precisely (think HTML/Javascript/CSS). Large vendors would start creating artificial barriers-to-entry. Regulation would crop up to "protect the consumer" -- failing entirely to protect anyone, the bureaucracy would also serve as barrier-to-entry. The big players would have no intensive to do a great job, only a mediocre one.
Things can only get uglier from there. Imagine if certain DNS registrars were offering cloud services. You'd find migrating your data and programs to be terribly difficult. Despite being highly illegal, you could never tell if your programs or data had been leaked for profit. Costs may seem reasonable for a while. Once the above barriers-to-entry start coming up, prices will rise (because they can). We'd never be able to dethrone Intuit (Quickbooks) once people's data live solely on their servers (The data you need to keep for 5+ years in case of an IRS audit). I could go on.
Privacy and reliability are both issues for home and business users. If either the service OR the ISP goes down, you're stuck.
Offsite computing resources make sense for small business web service and backup. They only make a little sense for mid size businesses. They make no sense for large businesses.
(And I recommend in-house backup even if it does make sense otherwise.)
Don't tell me that it's the way of the future. If cloud computing strikes, you'll be telling me that life stinks, deal with it. You might not see that yet. Hopefully, you won't need to.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
... you still need jobs to run the Data Centers and develop the applications and software. It's not like cloud computing makes tasks magically teleport to la-la land and be materialized back in your computer.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.