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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.