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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!
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.
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.
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.
While "Cloud" computing is here to stay, it is a while off
Cloud computing isn't here to stay. It's the latest buzzword of an industry trying to generate revenue. Whatever happened to SaaS? Oh, still not really here is it? Or "Web Services?" In the end, its just another way to move data around... nothing really revolunatary. But hey, lots of pointed haired people said "OMG our product needs to have / use Web services, it will change everything!" Ya, did it?
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.
.. 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"
Look for these want ads from the clueless recruiters:
Wanted: Cloud Computing Expert.
Must have 5 years in depth experience in Cloud Computing internals.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
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.
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.
selling to the upper management above IT
Yes, see, they've been following the trend 'away from technology to the business end'.
It rather illustrates the whole problem with that idea; there are a lot of IT people who understand enough of the business end to work out solutions to business problems, but few business people who understand enough technology to even know what their options are. Instead they find themselves listening to salesreps and getting sold on very expensive rectal probes, despite the lack any urgent business need for mass colonic inspection.
"Wait, didn't we have virtualization before?"
Sort of like when CIOs went 'now we've implemented virtualization!' in 2007, when in fact they'd been running it since 2001 or earlier.
I have little doubt that most IT people who've been in the business for at least a decade and managed to stay relevant have more than enough ability to adapt to most changes; the Forrester analysts comment: "Somebody who is smart at CRM is not easily retrained on datacenter automation," would reflect more on himself than on most IT professionals; if your employees can't be retrained from CRM to datacenter automation I'd seriously question their ability with CRM solutions in the first place. (Hmm, although, having seen a few CRM solutions, that would explain some things).
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.