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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 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.
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.
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%.
When the cloud utility is Google, IBM, Amazon or some other mega corporation there is no way in hell that the security or reliability will be any worse than what a small company can muster on their own. The writing's been on the wall for a long time now, but many techies that love dealing with server infrastructure doesn't want to give up control of what they have, or aren't able to admit that someone else can do their job better. It is the same thinking which is why some people still insist on building their own servers by assembling the hardware components themselves and running Gentoo instead of buying something pre-packaged. Economies of scale doesn't work out very well for those.
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I would beg to differ. Most don't see the NEED for virtualization, but I can assure you that it is very much a hidden asset (need) that is not being fulfilled.
Most people see technology as "we'll fix it when it breaks". And they have no idea how much their lives and businesses depend on it, until it disappears.
Long term replacement plans are never employed, and businesses end up being held hostage by disaster.
I know of plenty of small businesses who have gone out of business because their ONE server has died, and they can't recover the data. Their one server died, because it was ten to twelve years old, and they never thought to do backups, or replace it, or whatever because they don't have a full time IT staff dedicated to supporting it to explain why they need to worry about such things.
Virtualization is just another means of removing Hardware dependencies from the equation. That Abstraction layer is such that you can migrate the server to new hardware faster and easier than trying to migrate it. I can do a whole new hardware platform migration in a few minutes with VMWare. Shut the old machine down, move the VM to the new box, fire it up.
And when you add in features like snapshots it just rocks. I can't tell you how much snapshots are worth. I've even used VM snapshot in a criminal investigation, where we could show exactly when the fraud was started.
It saves them money, and headaches, and eventually it will save their business.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I went to an HP tech conference a month ago and everything was cloud this and cloud that and it was rather irritating for those of us that understand it's just a clustered OS in a virtual environment. With Cisco and HP creating switches that integrate with XenServer, HyperV, and of course VMWare it's just further abstraction of more and more components of the network. Of course you still need all the same hardware you used before as well as all the same software. You just need more software and more hardware to create what people expect from a "cloud."
What got worse, the IT Director, my immediate boss is all about clouds to the owner and I had to speak up saying that we already have a XenServer based cloud, why would we need to waste even more money on outsourcing something that has had lots of issues with reliability, security, and of course requires all new programming. The owner has a problem with outsourcing thankfully as he has been burned by it on more than one occasion. Of course the real issue with outsourcing is that you still need people around that are directly employed to manage the projects you're outsourcing. This means people like me will be around for quite some time to come.