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Ask Slashdot: What Will IT Look Like In 10 Years?
An anonymous reader writes "The IT industry is a lot different than it was 10 years ago; it underwent a huge boom in terms of labor and services required to keep up with the times. Now, we are entering a consolidation phase. The cloud makes it easier for companies to host e-mail, so now instead of organizations having their own Exchange guy, they will outsource it to the cloud. Instead of having a bunch of network engineers, they will deploy wireless and no longer need cabling or current levels of network engineering services. What do you think the long-term consequences of this will be? What skills do you think will be useful in 10 years? Is IT going to put its own out of work, like we did with the post office and libraries?"
I've yet to see a corporate wi-fi deployment that required less work on behalf of the network guy/gal(s) than a similar wired user base.. maybe I'm just naive?
The rumors of the death of "in house mail" is greatly exaggerated!
Though I agree the "Exchange guy" may become a dinosaur with the continue rise of the "Linux guy".
What will be the effect of organisations outsourcing everything and not employing engineers? Things will be poorly engineered and insecure. Everything will work a bit less well and take longer to get fixed. China will run things.
Korma: Good
Base services like email and storage will partially move to the cloud but most businesses have core business that rely on IT this will not change much most of the concerns will also be controll and ownership reg. cloud services also integration like authorization remains largelly unsolved.
Computers become phones, phones are disposable and aren't serviced or repaired. Home computers become more expensive to build as demand lessens.
Internet anonymity nearly gone and illegal in many countries. You history tracked and everything taxed. A two tier rich man / poor man internet.
A fee for everything. Network priority fee, cloud access fee, music playback license, tv viewing fee.
http://www.theconfidentmom.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/easy-button-resized-600.jpg
except it will result in the pulling of your heart plug in you don't respond in time.
The dino pen will become know as the bikeshed, since a heterogeneous virtualized cluster together with the web being the most common UI everyone will know how to build IT solutions and IT depts will fight tooth and nail for their idea to win.
IT depts will be more gender-neutral since the hardcore geeks will migrate towards vendors and labs, and people-skills will be even more important.
Cheap high-speed interconnects, better electrical efficiency, and ongoing miniaturization means you can build a supercomputer in your closet and become a local service provider.
All rites reversed 2010
To build a good wireless you need a significant amount of cable and skill. And since Ethernet still is the best for a installation with a high density of systems (offices) and power over Ethernet makes attaching thin clients on the table very easy i don't see how Ethernet would vanish soon.
Email services have been extremely cumulated since some time. What will reduce are the people installing software (but this trend also exists already for some time) and searching for mistakes.
Almost every company depends on networked computers to perform critical daily tasks. IT's function is to provide and maintain the computing infrastructure.
Unfortunately, there's MBA types counting beans and looking for places to save money. They look at IT and see a cost center; IT adds nothing to the bottom line.
So let's start with a company with a healthy IT department; since they do their jobs, all the computing resources are up and running, problems are few and far between and quickly resolved.
The bean counters look at the situation and how much they're paying IT - and see that everything is working fine. What are we paying these folks for? Lay them off to save money.
Things keep running for months but start to fall apart around the edges; the users fix some of their PC problems and work around others. At about 18 months or so something critical goes down; the Exchange server takes a crap or something similar. Now they're in a panic; we need qualified IT staff, pronto. So they start hiring again (at a higher pay scale) and the cycle repeats.
Try not to confuse this cycle with the longer cycle that moves computing power from the server to the desktop, then back to the server, back to the desktop and now back to the server. "Cloud" is just BS talk; it's dumb terminals on the desk and everything on the servers (again).
Working in IT is like being in a big game of musical chairs. The pay is good when you're getting paid, but there are gaps between the jobs. Right now isn't good for IT people, but in a year or two...
When talking about IT work and IT at work, there are a few practical things that will not happen:
We will not get get rid of physical keyboard, until we have a brain interface that can match typing speed on keyboard.
We will not get rid of 20+" displays with FullHD+ resolutions either, because doing actual work on some postage stamp sized display is much less efficient, much more pain.
These two things set pretty hard limits on what will happen.
Linux on the desktop ............
da da da dum indeed.
There will be a lot more agile shops, most of them implementing extreme programming, and making the developer feel even more like they're just part of a production line.
Don't get me wrong, I think parts of Agile are OK, but I've been to far too many interviews in the past where the interviewer thinks that Agile is the be all and end all of programming.
Summation 2
Steve Jobs in his last single interview with Walt Mossberg had a very good example of what is happening with IT right now. It basically goes like this:
The very first cars were trucks. The very first chariots humans built were to hawl food from A to B. They were utility vehicles. Only later, when the vehicles of each age became a commodity, did they turn into everyday passenger vehicles that had a certain mass-availability.
The computer now is doing the same thing, moving from being a tool for workers to being a commodity for everyday use by everyone, not just experts. Experts like us don't like that very much right now, but that's the way it goes. Bizarre IBM age keyboard layouts are finally becoming a thing of the past, UIs are becoming more task focused and the need for abstraction whilst using a 'Post-PC Device' is demising quickly. Even the mouse and the file-system is quickly fading into a specialist tool.
Everyday commodity computing is basically going the way of the iPad.
IT will move to a stronger separation of end-user and expert computing. Workstation-Laptops will become more rare and expensive, purpose built for programmers and admins to use them whilst tablet and netback devices will become a dime a dozen in all kinds of varieties. People won't look for actually performance but for brands of services. Sales talks like this: 'Can my device Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Netflix?' 'No, it can only Twitter and Facebook, you need an upgrade to Netflix with it.' will become normal at the HiFi-Store or carrier outlet.
Some vendors like Apple, Nintendo or Sony will have a strong vertical lock-in with cushy comfort solutions that require upgrading every 3rd year, others will be more open and more utility focused.
Carriers will get into bed with hardware, software and service brands more often. I expect branding and mindshare to become even more important than today in many places. To emphasize: I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft moved to the Linux kernel in a few years time and nobody would really care or even notice.
Our kind will specialize more and the rich-client web will get a new boost - as it is happening right now - because the platform diversity mess will be very much 1980ies style also like it is right now again.
All in all I'm not to scared about the way of IT, crazy DRM & patents, Human Rights and eavesdropping laws aside.
It's going to be just as interesting then as it is today.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Between now and then might be a little bit interesting.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The "facsimile" will start to reach the end of it's life as people find less practical use for it. This technology will replaced with what is known as "electronic mail" (or "e-mail" in technical circles) which is basically a form of mail, but electronic. The emergence of "mobile telephony" will start to rise as well - allowing people to communicate in real time in voice while out and about.
If you click on it expecting goatse you will be disappointed.
Sleep is futile.
He who gives up security for convenience deserves neither... or something like that.
The cloud is just a bad idea for companies who rely on their data. There's just no way around it. And wireless over wired? Perhaps if they painted all the walls with that special paint to block wifi from passing through... but then you might not get any phone calls either.
It won't smell too good, thats for sure.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The future of IT will be one guy, sitting in a closet, making minimum wage to push a button when someone's cupholder is broken. ...because management is afraid of automation.
"Now, we are entering a consolidation phase"?! No!
There are no indications that we are entering a consolidation phase.
640k... http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
No, the tighter integration of fast memory with multicore CPU/GPU-like capacities will create the new killer apps we have not developed yet. IBM Watson in your pocket? Perhaps, but most likely the servies or device is not developed yet.
There are no indications that we are entering a consolidation phase!
The anon who wrote this question really should stop eating buzzwords like they are candy, they are rotting what little brain he had to begin with.
Wireless to replace the networking guy? Because wireless is just plug and play right? You just setup one of those magic boxes and voila, the entire office building has zero-config access. That is the level this guy is thinking at, it shows he just hasn't got a clue. Just because you used wireless on your home router doesn't mean you are a networking expert, wireless or otherwise. Setting up wireless access is in fact harder for a big building then wired. Wired is simple, you got a cable, you draw it, you test it, it works. Cable doesn't get interference from a microwave or a factory nearby that runs something every monday. It has no dark spots, no interference. And you know what cable you plugged into which PC. I worked in offices where the visitors wifi was only working in the offices, not in the reception or meeting areas. That is helpful.
He also proposes to move your email into the cloud. Clearly he never worked with regulators who would throw such a fit at handing all your confidential data over to a third party.
This is just another post by some kiddy who heard some buzzwords and thinks his massive experience setting up his mom's computer gives him an insight into what IT support for even a medium sized company is all about.
The future is always just the same. Why? Because things don't change all that much. Take flying cars, do you think they are going to solve grid-lock magically? Right, because the entire skies will be open to them right? Do you want flying cars buzzing over YOUR house? No? Then they will be confined to corridors, highways in the sky, just as congested as roads. Proof? Airliners are already having trouble fitting enough planes into busy areas. Now imagine every jumbojet replaced by 300 individuals in the skies.
IT hasn't changed all that much. Even if you go wireless and into the cloud it will STILL require an admin on the ground to deal with it all. Just look at how often Amazon's cloud has been down. If you been in IT a little bit longer then this baby anon, you will know that IT is always changing and changing back again. From mainframe to PC's to the network to the cloud... it is just the latest craze. So the cable puller now pulls a cable to the wireless box and spends his time not checking cable but reception. Big whoop.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There is so much *great* tech in IT which can be used by anyone. Web servers, encryption, file sharing (both local and on the internet), and these are just some random examples... This will all go away, and I hate it.
Before electricity became ubiquitous, there were lots of great products that used hand-cranks and other genious mechanical systems. Now, living three days without electrical power would be a disaster. People will choose a electrical ("automatic") product over the mechanical one, even if the mechanical product is in all ways better.
The cloud (and web tech as well, I would argue) is going to be what everyone uses. It is generally easier to use, but there are lots of exceptional programs that aren't "cloud based". Sadly, the mainstream doesn't seem to be able to handle exceptions well, and will discard these. The cloud also makes more business sense, which always helps. If people depend on you (a business) 24/7, that's much better than if they interact with you 1000 times a day, and could easily find a replacement (think hosted e-mail vs. POP3 or running your own server).
I currently run a few linux/BSD machines at home, providing some very nice services for me.I recently realised that I will be like the people who make furniture in their garage, fix up old cars (I won't go into the new computerised cars), or even make simple electronic circuits. It can't be defended as an utilitarian thing any more, it's just a hobby. The cloud providers will be like huge chain stores, modern car makers and HP/Dell/Apple in comparison.
So in conclusion IT will be concentrated in large boring companies that know which products normal consumers and enterprises want, and provide them cheaply and easily. I'm actually depressed about this -- I thought that IT was something special: it has to do with how we learn, communicate and even think. Not only that, it can make millions of impossible tasks seem like a 1 hour job. When looking more closely however, telephone services, plumbing and automotive transportation were just as revolutionary. I can only hope that a new field of such great innovation will appear soon.
10 years ago, business were just embracing the Internet. A lot of companies were letting go of Novell Netware and placing baby steps out there on the net.
In those last ten years, a vast amount of services we used have been forgotten. Does anyone still use MySpace or Lycos for instance. In a couple of years the names like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and the like will be replaced by something more social and closer to the needs of the people.
In business, the idea of a computer on every desk will become a computer in every hand as the needs of computers become that of a personal experience. I can see a merge between the home and business more likely to happen where you have one device for your company that works equally well at home. Less requirements for being in a physical building give way to home based working or virtual office cubicles.
I can see the power being moved back to the client-server model which served us well until the advent of the PC. Now with the PC market beginning to wane, the client-server will become more the tiny box you plug in that gives you your wireless signal and virtual desktop environment as well as the connection to your ISP.
There will still be a need for someone to set these boxes up, so the sysadmin/network engineer becomes a similar role to the technical support engineer who drives to a location to repair a computer.
Perhaps there will be a direct connection with the brain in 10 years time, so you think what you want to do and the computer relays the images and audio as synaptic responses to and from the brain directly. That way there would be no need for a tablet or gestures of the hands or fingers. The potential for zombies would be more of a problem though!
Some time in the next 10 years somebody will crack the "problem" of micropayments: fractions of a penny. Once that happens then pretty much every website will cost something to visit - the commercial imperatives are too high for it to be otherwise. Apps will also charge on a per-use basis, rather than a buy once and use forever principle.
Once sites can charge 0.05p for a visitor to view a page, both the need for advertisers and the attraction they offer will become obsolete. Websites will make their money directly, and the iron grip around their testicles will pass from the search engines that pass them advertising eyeballs, to the brokers that process their micropayments - though there will be huge battles between the old regime: of Google and it's friends and the newcomers, from wherever they come.
I would expect the transition to be particularly painful, especially during the time when there are two iron-grips (one on each 'nad?) pulling in different directions. The resolution will come when part of the micropayment can be passed on to the referrer - whether search engine or linking site, in lieu of their lost advertising revenue - though we can expect the landscape of the 202x's to be a lot different, in terms of which companies are dominant.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Bizarre IBM age keyboard layouts are finally becoming a thing of the past, UIs are becoming more task focused and the need for abstraction whilst using a 'Post-PC Device' is demising quickly. Even the mouse and the file-system is quickly fading into a specialist tool.
Hey, now, some of us like our "bizarre IBM-age" keyboards. If you've never used an IBM Model M, you don't know what you're missing.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
"The anon who wrote this question really should stop eating buzzwords like they are candy, they are rotting what little brain he had to begin with."
The problem is that as long as enough rotten brain people eat the buzzwords they'll make it a self-fulfilled profecy.
"Wireless to replace the networking guy? Because wireless is just plug and play right?"
Quite a good example. In the last six months I've been in three SMBs that went to "all wireless" and deployed by amateurs too. No wonder one morning out of three they need to reboot the spots (the magic solution for all problems, it seems), they have "misterious" lags and efficiency problems from time to time... Are they going to go with cable? Hell no -it would be too expensive, cumbersome and everybody know wifi is the future! Instead, they cope with the lack of efficiency and the from-time-to-time hiring of an outside "expert" to a total cost obviously higher than cabling the damn office. Right now those problems is just "business as usual" and done with it, just like most people thinks that worms, misterious problems, reading a whole document to find a word instead of asking the computer to look it for them... is "business as usual" and the only way computers can work.
"He also proposes to move your email into the cloud. Clearly he never worked with regulators"
Oh, but it is the cloud providers the ones working with regulators, don't worry about that. On the other hand, all the "but regulators!" is very overstated. Regulators have not the slightest problem with outsourced services -no economy could sustain itself otherwise and both at the national and international levels heavy work is being done to find the nice spot both providers and consumers are interested in.
I've been in cloud computing for about two decades. The marketing and buzzwords have changed, but not much else.
The fundamental problems with "cloud services" is asymmetry, crime, contracts, and uniforms.
Asymmetry is when you're losing $10K/day in revenue because emails from China are getting blocked, and your $19.95/month provider literally can't afford to fix it. Based on their projected profit, and cost of new sales, they're financially better off disposing of your account, complete with you paying an early termination fee. There is no such thing as "commodity service". You pay a cloud provider $20/month you get $20/month of service and not one penny more. You pay a local admin $7K/month you get $7K/month of service. If you're only getting $20/mo of service for $7000/mo of salary, that is a profound management failure. Outsourcing merely means the PHB will find a new way to cause $7K/mo of damage to the bottom line. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
Crime is a big issue. Inside the USA things are every approaching 1984 soviet lifestyle... but cross international boundaries and its like dealing with pirates hundreds of years ago (in some cases, literally). If you outsource to China, you better be prepared to move everything including management team there, like recently happened to GE medical imaging, which is no longer a US company. If you have non-technical managers signing technical contracts, they literally might not even know they're giving away the store, until its too late. Managers in the USA are coddled because corporate and govt interests have merged in a fascist system here... its not like that when you cross international boundaries, its more like the wild west. Good luck, softie east coast city frat boy, in a border town of saloons, stagecoach robbers, and gunslingers (in some cases, literally).
Another problem is contracts. Non-technical users are too dumb to intelligently sign one, so they'll get ripped off. If you have a weak contract, you'll get identity thefted or have to pay for a lifetime. If you have a strong contract with endless credit checks, competitive bidding, DUN number verification, auditing, etc, you'll have a three month outage while switching to new providers... can your business survive 3 months without a fileserver or email? If so, you shouldn't be wasting the money on it to begin with.
Uniforms is the biggest problem. Back in ye old days, blue collar factories sometimes / often supplied uniforms for their wage slaves. In this enlightened era where the only jobs are selling insurance and homes to each other, we are expected to provide for ourselves, and show up at work appropriately clothed rather than nude and expect the boss to pay to dress us. For a decade we've had endless complaints about having to carry a crappy corporate issued locked down phone plus your "real" personal phone. I think the days of a company issued computer / phone are about as numbered as the days of a company issued pair of uniform pants... it'll never quite go away, but the vast majority of workers will simply provide their boss with their personal email addrs, and their personal cell phone number, and that'll be the end of that. Carry your personal laptop into work, plug into what amounts to a DMZ or extremely fast internet pipe, VNC or equivalent into some apps, firefox into other apps... Contractors already live this life, wage slaves will soon. The idea of my employer of the moment selecting my cell phone is frankly weirder than the idea of my employer of the moment selecting my business casual attire. My boss does not buy my socks, nor my car, and soon, not my cellphone and laptop.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sure what you say is true. There will always be work for true experts with experience. But people just entering the field need to consider how things are changing. The company I work at does not have a single server in house. We don't rent rackspace at colo. We are 100% cloud based. We consume SaaS services. We've been looking for a web ops lead and getting resumes from traditional IT people who are clueless about the new tools like Amazon EC2/S3, salesforce.com. They list off credentials about how many flavors of hardware switches they can configure. Those jobs are diminishing for sure. We can write off the anon poster as a poser. But some of the points he makes are indeed part of the reality facing IT. I've seen a number of great points in the comments here about regulations, privacy, yielding control of mission critical apps... But the solution isn't to cling to the past--its to look forward and say "how can we solve these problems in the cloud." For giant corporations maintaining server farms and in-house ops may make sense, but increasingly the services they need to remain competitive will be consumed over the cloud meaning they are suddenly thrust into the same problem space as a small startup PLUS all their existing challenges. I'm always amazed by the number of people who attack questions like our anon poser asked. It almost seems they are trying to convince themselves that their skills remain relevant. None of our micro-skills will be relevant forever. It's the macro-skills that matter. It's the problem solving skills that carry us forward. Of course the rules of the game will constantly evolve. A focus on hardware-side of IT will certainly limit your job opportunities in the future, whereas understanding how to configure and secure business workflows on the cloud will grow. So sure the poser may have been a newb, but if he's considering entering the IT workforce as a career, he's asking the right questions.
I'll tell you what IT will look like in 10 years: We'll all have our heads in the cloud.
I'm getting tired of the old mainframe system getting plastered as something new and innovative, personally I'd like to see everybody return to the dirt.
What Will IT Look Like In 10 Years?
If IT candidates do not repent and better themselves, Corporations will inflict a terrible punishment on all IT workers. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great many geeks, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither Windows nor Linux. The living will envy the dead. The work of Corporations will infiltrate even into the IT training classes. Cubicals and Copying Machines will be sacked.
Given that you would be running in cached mode, once your users were up and running that would be fine. I've seen 80 users hanging off a 2Mb connection back to head office where Exchange was hosted, so 500 users... You could get away with 10Mb easily.
I don't know where you are now, but I get gig for 2.5k pcm with unlimited data. If you have 500 users then getting two to have telco redundancy is EXTREMELY affordable.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
The trend in IT since day 1 has been to alternate waves of centralization (Mainframe, client-server, cloud) with waves of decentralization (PC, workstation). Really, it'll probably be like it is now, just more so. Firms with very simple needs will use cloud-based mail and sharing solutions, firms with more need for customization and/or performance will run their own servers. If they are large enough to justify the expense, they'll hire an IT staff, otherwise they will use companies like mine when needed. Computers themselves will still need support, even if all the data is in a server farm somewhere. Not to mention that cloud computing assumes Internet that's always there and always working.
Wireless will become more important, but wired will still be used when viable because it's faster and more reliable (plus every wired computer is one less tapping shared spectrum). Windows will continue to suck less, Macs the same, and Linux will keep being just a couple of years away from desktop usage.
The wildcard is the emergence of the iPad (not tablets in general yet - the market so far has decreed that no tablet other than the iPad matters thus far). iPads alone won't redefine the IT business, but if any other platform takes hold to even close to the degree the iPad has thus far then tablets may finally become a viable part of the IT environment - ant that has the potential to redefine how applications are used and support is provided.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
In the downturn after the executive branch allowed (neocon agenda facilitating) sept 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. governemt allowed a massive wave of H1B immigrants to drive IT salaries downward. Then the IRS enacted rules to make it extraordinarily difficult for engineer or IT worker to be independent consultant, rather saying such a person was in most cases an "employee" and subject to such taxes and rules. Then certain consulting firms owned by those of a certain ethnic group were the preferred ones to get outsourced IT work as companies reduced internal IT staff. This is just one tiny piece of a larger picture, where a very small group of wealthy elite, with most of the world's governments in their pocket, are building their New World Order.
A number of interrelated things could happen: 1. Application development could be automated using 'software machines' derived from an 'engineering' design as we move to a design-to-product capability - akin to a factory or industrialised approach to software development which is needed to increase the capacity of the sector to deliver increasingly adaptable information services (has happened in manufacturing - from batch to continuous production with high degrees of automation using machines); 2. 'Component' libraries could come into being where corporations and governments can self assemble solutions based on 'frameworks' that are delivered as 'utilities' that can then be deployed across multiple organisations and users - a 'grid' for information services; 3. Application development based on points 1 and 2 above could be internalised within organisations and rapid; 4. The application is secondary - the means to automate the construction of applications becomes important and where the value is; 5. Information systems become increasingly seamless - senior management gains closer 'proximity' to operations and middle management has no purpose; 6. Transition from a labour intensive to a 'factory' based operation changes the labour to capital mix - capitalism does this in terms of labour substitution for capital - the remaining labour (application designers) become more productive and exponentially add value (many examples of this happening elsewhere - traders in financial services being replaced by computer trading - value is in the analysis not the trade), and; 7. The 'cost plus' model of ICT delivery will inevitably and fundamentally change given the above changes as will where value is developed and the skills required.
Pretty much like today only more so.
You can migrate 80 users with 500MB to 5GB mailboxes, each, using a 2meg because they're running "cached mode"?
rofl much?
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
There are problems with our original poster's original claims. Wireless, for example, is very useful for traveling devices and remote smartphones. But safe such access is dependent on VPN or other encryption technologies. But the amount of electromagnetic noise from all the wireless connections is rapidly approaching saturation in crowded locations, and there aren't enough big frequency ranges that the FCC might release to resolve this in the USA. Wired will remain critical for bandwidth and security in the actual working network and systems environments in which we, as engineers, spend so much of our time.
Similarly, much of what is outsourced to the could and _should_ be outsourced to a competent shop. A 20 person company has no business wasting their resources hiring, and keeping trained, someone able to manage core DNS, backup, email, and calendar systems when such cheap and reliable "cloud" systems are available. The services are too important, and too vulnerable to error, for everybody in even "a company full of geeks" to be trusted to run it reliably. I'm afraid I've seen far too many environments where every developer thought themselves capable of running the core IT services, and the results were so uneven and patchy that it was quite unstable.
I _do_ see the Linux transformation of core servers as an ongoing process. The purchase of Sun by Oracle is the death knell for Solaris, and HP is abandoning HP-UX. While Apple has effectively taken over FreeBSD, they've also effectively taken it closed source, and far more storage devices, plug-in email appliances such as database servers and mini-computer based video boxes and smartphones are being Linux based. Even most MS Exchange based shops use a Linux system in front to handle spam filtering. If Samba 4 can ever get out of alpha testing, I expect a huge array of Windows based network storage systems to be replaced nearly overnight by more stable and less expensive Samba based systems.
MS Word will continue to dominate document writing: Powerpoint will continue to dominate presentations. While the open source tools will continue to improve, Microsoft will _again_ manipulate their undocumented and inconsistent API's to break compatibility.
Virtualization is going to get even more interesting. I can't quite picture which way it's going to go, but I do anticipate that a lot of legacy hardware preservation, keeping old systems alive in a rack so we can fall back to recover data or just in case the new system fails, will be replaced by virtualization. And _those_ go to the cloud very well.
Last, I strongly suspect that the migration to IPv6 will still be less than 50% of all devices, probably less than 30%. The benefits of IPv6 simply do not matter to most environments, who are better off in security and network management terms using NAT and thus have no internal need for IPv6. The result will be growth of "mixed-stack" solutions, but until there is reason to leave IPv4 for systems already configured, the "hysteresis" of remaining consistent with existing infrastructure will preclude wholesale migration.
No, the tighter integration of fast memory with multicore CPU/GPU-like capacities will create the new killer apps we have not developed yet. IBM Watson in your pocket? Perhaps, but most likely the servies or device is not developed yet.
Quite the opposite. Computing resources are still energy intensive and storage takes up a lot of space. On the other hand, bandwidth keeps increasing. We're actually moving back towards thinner clients for a lot of tasks.
At the same time, virtualization is taking over the server space. If I have a physical server failure, I just restart the affected logical servers on a different piece of hardware, and for larger offices than mine, that process is fully automated. Even at that, though, it's going to take a few more decades before setting up and expanding your IT infrastructure becomes as simple as buying a box and plugging it in.
One space I'm still seeing plenty of activity is custom business apps. Programmers, at least, are in no danger of becomming irrelevant any time soon. On the other hand, we also live like wildebeests (pun intended!), moving from one project/watering hole to the next as soon as things dry up. Also, good security guys are in high demand, and I'm sure will be for at least the next 20 years.
You currently need (in the US) an FCC license to operate a radio transmitter of any real capability.
In 10 years the same will be true to operate an outward facing server.
That, plus the marketing thrust of the large tech companies who cannot sustain growth any other way, will force everyone to adopt a cloud based model for their back office.
That said, buy lots of Cisco.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Yes, techonology will change, but the IT guy will still do what the IT guy does, fix all the problems that nobody else can. People will still get virus's and trojans and need new hardware. Yes, I believe that we may get to the point that we might be able to have cloud data, but to keep that data secure and encrypted (or just secure) is going to require VPNs and other tech. I don't really want to put my company's source code out there for the cloud to see (I'm sure all the cloud is secure and nobody could possibly mount my drives or make a clone of my machine). I can't tell you how many times I've had to help the same people over and over again with the same task, e.g. set up email, provide a link and/or password, print to a printer that doesn't work, set up a mobile device, backup or restore a computer.
In the 18 years I've been doing IT, the day-to-day tasks haven't really changed all that much.
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing about wireless precluding the need for network engineers. Do you have even the slightest clue what your network engineers do? I'll give you a hint: not cable runs. You can get some guy making less than $15 an hour to pull cables through walls and climb in attics. Why would you need somebody with any technical inclination at all to do that?
Your network engineers are there for ensuring cross-node connectivity and security. When I set up your routes, manage your IPSEC tunnels, and design your firewall rules, I don't give two shits about what you are using for physical connectivity. You could have some cups attached together with strings and it wouldn't change my network design.
In fact, wireless gives me more work to do. Wireless setup, while easy, takes more configuration than plugging a wire into a port. And if your building is of any size and thick construction, I'm going to require a lot more networking nodes to service the whole thing adequately than I need when I can run 300 feet in any direction with a cable. Which means if your douchebag veeps want to be able to walk around the building with their iThingies, I have to make sure the pieces of junk can connect to any wifi hotspot in the building, which is its own set of headaches.
And then there's security. Wireless is an external attack vendor. Yes, it's cute that you think that encrypting your radio signals makes it impossible to eavesdrop. It's even more awesome when somebody somewhere demands that I reduce encryption levels because some older device they have can't even handle WPA2/AES. But here's the thing: bad guys can now sit out in the parking lot and collect your encrypted traffic undetectably. If they use some directional antennas and some feed horns, they might even be able to get farther away. After that, they can sit back and try to brute force your wireless key using their GPUs from the comfort of their homes. After that, they could perform corporate espionage from the cafe next door and if they play their cards right, there is not a damn thing you can do to even tell they are doing it.
I have never set up wireless that was directly attached to somebody's corporate network. When I set up a wifi hotspot at somebody's business, it gives them access to the internet and the internet only. They can securely VPN after that if they want to get to company data.
Does this all still sound like you can just plug in some Linksys routers you got from Fry's and fire your networking guy?
Thank you, for your comments re: buzzwords. I've been trying to move my laundry and dishwashing to the cloud, in the hopes of making Nagging Wife obsolete; but the magic of this cloud didn't come to fruition.
The idea is that the machines do the drudgery work, and humans can do only what they enjoy, indeed. The very essence and fundamental idea of better technology is to do more with less. The idea of any profit-seeking company is to produce more with less. Only one reason that has not yet resulted in mass unemployment -- expectations and consumption continue to rise. If technology can also produce for the increased demands of higher expectations and consumption, jobs will decrease.
It is a social and economic problem, not science and technical. The very idea of science and technology is to reduce the work needed. The problem our society has is, the benefits of scientific/technical advance are far greater to whoever can apply it for their direct needs. Others can actually lose out due to technical advancement of others, and frequently many do. For example, the Internet and telecom allowed research to move to India and China, and many US techs simply have less work.
The argument that cotton-pickers will simply become cotton-picking machine operators and salesmen, and nobody will be left unemployed, is simply ridiculous. Of course technology reduces the labor required, that's the very idea human advancement. What's needed is an economic/social mechanism for those who are not working on something "productive", meaning profitable, to continue studying and doing research for further social advancement, somehow, rather than being bitter and opposing social advancement because they are left without their job, which a machine does now.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Just wait until someone finally comes up with a viable standard for some hybrid between cellular and wi-fi (802.69?) that basically puts gigabit wiring back into the walls so it can feed hundreds of access points with service radii of ~10-25 feet apiece, and seamless hand-offs as users move around. Wi-fi is easy if your goal is to enable somebody with a laptop to get online at low speeds and not move around a lot. Enabling somebody to walk across the office and enjoy seamless wireless 100+mbit/sec connectivity every inch of the way is another matter entirely, and a problem companies like Cisco have barely even *started* to work on.
The sad, simple fact is that you can't fix stupid. No matter how much you try to educate the end user, they don't seem to listen.
Actually, I think that depends upon the confidentiality and nature of the information that may be passed in an e-mail. For example, in the U.S. various federal regulatory agencies like the SEC require all electronic communication between registered traders and customers to be kept in an indexed, automated, read only archive for up to 7 years after the relationship ends. I imagine that similar requirements are mandated by the SEC's counterparts in Europe and Asia.
Doing it right is not an easy or cheap endeavor. I have not heard of a single vendor who has been willing to step up to own that particular problem because of the legal ramifications if they screw up. If there are some out there now, let me know! This is not a job that anyone likes doing.
OTOH, it's easy to find a vendor who will sell you software and hardware to do it yourself because they can always take the stance that a failure was due to the customer setting up wrong or not maintaining it correctly.
You bought a couple of robots, downloaded some software to them, and they built a house for you out of compressed earth, sprayed foam, carbon fiber and plastics. In five days, working 24/7. As well as a huge telecom antenna, and energy plant, which supplies the whole neighborhood. Your robots now also wash, plant, pick, clean, drive, cook, deliver, and all sorts of other drudgery. You've cancelled and substituted most things that used to cost you a ton of money because you and a couple of cousins can produce all of it in the basement. You spend 10 hours a week doing robot maintenance and other jobs for yourself and some others. Otherwise you've picked up biotech and AI studies and tennis at the local community college, where you also do some robot programming.
You're worried about keeping a job for some big company? What for? You miss the spin, meetings, politics, and confusion?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Computers become phones [...] Home computers become more expensive to build as demand lessens.
I've heard this claim a few times. But I haven't seen any solid evidence that it'll happen any time soon. Case in point: ASUS has introduced the Eee Pad Transformer, a laptop using essentially a smartphone OS and chipset. What's to stop someone from porting Android application development tools to Android?
Yea, I am having trouble with wireless networking being any easier than regular networking. The wires are only part of the solution -- there still have to be routers and switches and bottlenecks to unblock.
And cloud computing just means you pile up resources in your data center, and what's behind the cloud is no more plug and play than what it replaced . . . virtual desktops require even more expertise to appropriately manage.
IT will look like this in 10 years: smaller devices for end-users, more ubiquitous access to networking. Beyond that who can say?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I'm just gonna point out that we've already read this book. Centralized computing was the wave of the future decades ago and look what happened. The mainframe age came and went. Computing power shifted from central servers to departmental servers and desktops. Now we're going back to the mainframe model on a larger scale, consolidating computing power and resources in central locations with dumb terminals in userland. In 10-20 years, the corporate hive-mind will want control back from The Cloud and power will shift back to their own private systems.
and Microsoft will finally have fixed ALL the bugs and patched ALL the security holes. Networks will configure themselves. IT people will be entirely unnecessary.
Haha. reminds me of this bit about Girlfriend 2.0. :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
There was no mention in the grandparent post about migration... But if you want to bring it up; do the math... That's about 14 hours, so you remote in and move everyone's mailboxes on a fri night or a sat and check in a couple of times on the weekend. If you're really worried about it, there is tools from Quest to help:
http://www.quest.com/exchange-uc/
*shrug* still don't see the big deal here....
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
In general, yes. I have been in the business for a long time and have seen the slow progression of this already. What took a team of people is now done by end users...
Sure there will be IT people, but the numbers will be vastly reduced, and wont pay as much either....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hang on, re-reading, what are you migrating? Servers reside in Head Offce or cloud provider, either way, same deal, where are you migrating them to? Another service?
Cached mode allows you to run a lot smaller (Down to 9.6Kb/s/user if memory serves) data lines.
ROFL loads, but can't understand your point
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Back in the day you needed a detailed knowledge of TCP/IP before you could connect to a computer. In the early 90s a working knowledge of HTML and JavaScript could get you a good IT job. These days people are employed to type stuff into Twitter. In the future we'll see people with very low levels of technical knowledge working in internal "IT" jobs who mostly just update text and liaise with centralised infrastructure organisations. Small and medium companies, and maybe even larger ones, will not maintain on-site servers because hiring data-centre based hardware complete with on-site "real IT" guys will be much more cost efficient.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
in twenty years?
A cloud isn't something you can pin down; its amorphous nature permits it to be redefined as requirements change or, more commonly, flaws emerge. In a marketing sense it is a thing of beauty - instead of selling 'vapourware', you can sell vapour directly.
I see some steps made in this direction. For example, VMWare making a VM that runs on a user's phone with their work stuff safely encrypted. Remote wipe comes along, it just zaps that VM; the user's stuff is untouched.
Some things I wouldn't mind seeing. I would love an Atrix that would have the ability to use Citrix and other remote software, so on a trip, I can just carry a "dumb" docking station with all the vital data being on the phone, assuming Google makes it standardized so the $600 keyboard/monitor does not have to be re-bought with every new mode. of phone. Combine this with virtual machine tech so work based stuff for multiple employers/organizations is isolated from other stuff, and that would provide excellent usability.
"For example, in the U.S. various federal regulatory agencies like the SEC require all electronic communication between registered traders and customers to be kept in an indexed, automated, read only archive for up to 7 years after the relationship ends."
But they don't force it to be stored under the company's premises, does it? (hello, ironmountain).
"I have not heard of a single vendor who has been willing to step up to own that particular problem because of the legal ramifications if they screw up."
Don't you see the 'non sequitur'? If I'm a company, I'll have to store my own communications to regulatory compliance, which means I have the expertise and technical ability to do it. Do I need any more to store other companies' communications? I'd say no.
Most of what I have read does a pretty thorough job of debunking the original post. The only thing I have seen missing (maybe not reading enough comments...) is legal. Two points:
First: if the company directly controls email, maintaining attorney/client privilege is not too difficult. Also, company controlled email can be set up so as to easily enforce retention rules and to be searchable to produce in discovery. Both extend to documents under company control on company computers. This is also why the reply about employees showing up with their own laptops probably doesn't work, though there is other good content in that reply. Example: Even though my company did recently move from BB for everyone to "get your own phone", the company email is still basically under company control and they by contract have the right to remote wipe my phone (which I can then restore everything from my computer if need be, except if there is a reason not my Exchange connection without them doing it...). You can't extend that and the legal protections of ownership to an employee owned laptop. With a contractor, it really is different since data sharing and responsibilities can be spelled out in the service agreement (note, not employment contract...).
Second: software licenses are cheaper and easier to enforce at the company level rather than the personal level, and you can by putting some thought into it enforce uniformity. The contracting is just so much cleaner than trying to control employee laptops to some kind of uniform standard.
Have you been following the redefinition of C++?
It is possible that the wild abandon of PL/1 inspired 'C's more focussed approach; and perhaps if C++ can eventually inspire 'P' (C's logical successor) then it won't have been a total waste.
Here is one prediction: If the cloud takes off, people will get used to having a desktop or laptop with ChromeOS, and all their devices syncing to a server, with all apps either cloud based or offline copies of them. Essentially the computers at home would be X terminals, except perhaps for games, would have a device that does the 3D rendering and stream it to the terminal that wants the pictures.
Problem with that is that it requires constant Internet connections, and with bandwidth caps, throttling, RST forgeries and other items, bandwidth actually is becoming more expensive.
The "grunt" will not go away. No matter how locked down Windows 8 gets with remote booting, rolling back cracks, etc., Joe Sixpack will still manage to get malware on his machine. There are just too many people with lots of money who want to crack into his machine and use it for a botnet. So, the guy who runs around and deals with this won't be disappearing anytime soon. What we might see are low to midrange PCs having an OS image that is signed and cannot be modified unless the new image that replaces is also signed. This way, a reinstall can be done similar to a recovery partition, even if the HDD is toast. Maybe even a full recovery mini-OS like Windows PE, although I sort of dream there.
On the server end, we will see people slap the name "private cloud" on their data center, go heavy on blade enclosures and VMWare, and essentially little will be fundamentally changed there. The SAN will just feed virtual HBAs over NPIV instead of hardware WWNs. Hub/edge networking will change a bit because of FCoE and combined networks, but still be pretty similar.
IPv6? Hopefully we will cross that bridge soon, and get over all the problems in the stack (so we don't have to deal with the IPv6 analogs of ping-of-death, teardrop, land, smurf, etc.) However, there is a lot of money and control to be had by keeping the IPv4 address space as the only space.
We will see more devices for a bit, then people will return to the desktop or laptop PC as their main device. Tablets are fine, but you can't really use one for compiling code, or being a file server in a pinch. One reason people will end up going back to general purpose machines is the increasing lockdown of devices. Maybe with HTC offering to unlock bootloaders, Motorola's cellphone division in capable hands, and other items, this may change, but Apple is the flagbearer in this field and they show zero interest in relenting on the locking down side.
Server hardware will be similar, except that with SSDs being relatively cheap, server machines will start having smarter drive controllers and hypervisors that can autotier. Files used a lot on a machine will be placed on the SSD filesystem, while stuff not used as much drops to the magnetic platters. The operating system swapfile will sit on the SSD, and the SSD drives will be closer to the CPU, so they can take advantage of faster I/O, as opposed to normal drives needing SATA, SAS, or FC. Machines will have hypervisors in the BIOS and will be pretty much plug and play into a vSphere console or other interface.
Security, we will be seeing a wholesale move to repos or app stores, and roadblocks put in to dissuading people from just grabbing something off the Net and installing it.
We might even see OSes start denying users access to admin functions altogether. App installs would be handled by SUID tasks, disk management would be handled by users that have that checkbox, etc. I just wonder if there will be a way to pop up a good old fashioned "#" sign, or an Administrator command prompt. Hopefully for servers there will be.
It's not that difficult to see where will everything be 5 to 10 years from now. Just look at the trends, the winners and the loosers from the last 5 years and extrapolate further.
From the perspective of large corporations, the next decade will be dominated by a gradual reduction of internal IT, and the exodus towards a Hybrid Enterprise Cloud, hosted by increasingly large service providers (Verizon and AT&T for example). Internal IT will still control the most private and confidential data sources and workloads, but the majority of the business will run elsewhere. Networks will flatten with L2 becoming more prevalent (VDL2) and new virtualization technologies for routers, firewalls, load balancers will appear. Datacenters will become unmanned (lights-out). Management software will evolve to become corrective and will add layers of IA to many routine functions. The server-to-admin ratio will be in the thousands. Most enterprise software in use today will still be in use tomorrow, so Infrastructure as a Service will still be relevant for quite some time.
The next evolutionary phase will be in the Platform as a Service, and all the new applications that will be created under that model. Corporate programmers will finally be able to focus on the business logic while the underlying "Platform" takes care of the rest. Programming languages will evolve accordingly to leverage this new layer of the stack. If IaaS is "the new hardware", the PaaS layer is "the new OS". Programmers will have the capability to run their code anywhere with one click, from a personal VM on their laptop, to their Internal Cloud, to Google AppEngine, to Amazon, to VMware CloudFoundry,or whatever else may come up tomorrow. Databases will move to a NoSQL model and will mostly run in memory. All applications will enforce a well defined set of APIs that will empower the next layer of the stack, End-User Computing, to leverage whatever new hardware format comes up in the future, tablets, mobile phones, etc, to have native interfaces while all the heavy processing and business logic happens in the PaaS layer. Enterprises will move to a BYOD model for good or for bad, but they will have to enable choice to attract and retain the talent of the next generation. Virtualization will happen in every mobile device, with personal and corporate "personalities" where everybody gets what they need and want.
It's uncertain how will all this affect IT people. Proper architecture of each layer will ensure good jobs for highly-skilled individuals, while more operational roles will be replaced by software automation. That said, no matter what direction technology takes, the one job that will always be present is in Security. New environments mean new threats and counter-measures. May you live in interesting times. We can't complain, can we?
Cable doesn't get interference from a microwave or a factory nearby that runs something every monday. It has no dark spots, no interference.
If cable doesn't get interference then why do we have shielded twisted pair cable?
Also, there is something called Alien Crosstalk which is the coupling of signals between cables, a key issue in the development and implementation of 10G-BASE T Ethernet. I am unaware of the issue being solved yet.
Is what IT will look like in 10 years.
that is all.
-
I've been in I.T. long enough to have a few guesses.
IMHO, the "cloud" push will largely turn out to be little more than a fad or phase. I'm not saying it will go away; rather, businesses will go through initiatives to move as much as possible into the cloud, only to discover some serious disadvantages over time which cause most of them to pull back. Eventually, I think you'll see it stabilize into a situation where many people have at least ONE application (Exchange being a really good candidate) in the cloud, while still maintaining local I.T. infrastructure and servers for other things.
I know where I work now, for example, one of our issues is limited bandwidth. We can't get cable Internet without paying close to $15,000 in expenses to roll the cable out to our location first, and high speed DSL isn't an option either. We're stuck with T1 circuits, and currently, a 3mbit bonded T1 pair is around $700 per month (even higher if I didn't really shop around for the lowest price). Given that, it makes no sense to put our mission critical apps out in the cloud, where everyone would vie for that 3mbit of bandwidth to run them, AND still need it for regular Internet downloads and surfing.
But even if you HAVE cheap broadband, there are always questions like data security. (Say your cloud provider goes out of business. What guarantee do you have they'll really wipe all the hard drives and backups holding your data when they liquidate all their equipment?) Furthermore, as the cloud gets more popular, I think you'll see more instances of outages/downtime to go with it. Whether it's really warranted or not, businesses are going to get nervous when the execs read about the latest outage someplace, and start asking what their I.T. departments are doing to ensure it doesn't impact them. The most cost-effective and practical answer is going to involve replication and running some local hardware, IMO -- again ensuring your I.T. staff has to be retained.
But ultimately, I think the BIGGEST reasons most companies need to retain some I.T. staff is the user training and support/hand-holding that's expected. The vast majority of employees are NOT that computer-savvy, yet they're asked to spend a lot of time using a computer in their workplace. That demand comes with a hidden cost. Either they pay a premium up-front to only hire people with a high level of computer skills, or they pay by way of retaining I.T. "help desk" and "support specialist" staffers who come running when Lisa in accounting jams up the laser printer trying to run checks, or Joe needs to know how to sum several columns in an Excel spreadsheet. None of that is going to change if the apps are hosted off-site instead of on-site.
For a decade we've had endless complaints about having to carry a crappy corporate issued locked down phone plus your "real" personal phone. I think the days of a company issued computer / phone are about as numbered as the days of a company issued pair of uniform pants... it'll never quite go away, but the vast majority of workers will simply provide their boss with their personal email addrs, and their personal cell phone number, and that'll be the end of that. Carry your personal laptop into work, plug into what amounts to a DMZ or extremely fast internet pipe, VNC or equivalent into some apps, firefox into other apps... Contractors already live this life, wage slaves will soon. The idea of my employer of the moment selecting my cell phone is frankly weirder than the idea of my employer of the moment selecting my business casual attire. My boss does not buy my socks, nor my car, and soon, not my cellphone and laptop.
You're very wrong. No one wants their company fronted by badboy69er@hooligan.com. Employers do not usually give out your home phone number for business purposes to clients and colleagues. Employers are looking for more control than ever - many places you use to be able to plug in your laptop you're no longer permitted....and most employers do not select your business casual attire, but show up in something inappropriate (too outside the norm) and I bet you'll be told to go home and get changed. Plenty of employers do offer cars as part of the employment package by the way. You're free to use something else, but you'll find it's not economically worth your while.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Come on, at least give a link: http://www.zombo.com/
Tongue firmly in cheek here. I've been working on these babies since '79 and they just get renamed. Enterprise server is the latest. Unless there's a new one since lunch. To me it's a mainframe if it runs the same operating system that I know and love. And supports about 500 people, 7/24 365 days a year. With an uptime of 99.999% or so. When Windows/[whatever] does that, put me out to stud.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
fire your wife and get a maid.
What the HECK are you drawing your conclusions for? I have worked in IT for 14 years, with different companies, all Fortune 500, and have yet to see a single thing you have predicted. The worst I have seen is having to tell a bunch of Mac Laptop users the reason their network is so slow isn't because there is something wrong with the network, but because they insist on having 30 people connect to a single wireless access point rather than using the gigabit ethernet at their desk. Wi-Fi creates all sorts of headaches for IT departments, and you can't have WiFi without having a hard-wired network to plug it into. This means that you need to have someone who understands all the old stuff such as Firewalls, switches, routers, load balancing, etc, in addition to understand how wireless works.
And what companies are you seeing who is moving their e-mail to the cloud? Corporate security in most companies would prevent e-mail from being housed outside of the company. You may see something small like a couple of city council politicians in a small town using Gmail to communicate, but I can guarentee that you won't be seeing a defense contractor do this! Exchange isn't going anywhere!
And quite frankly, IT hasn't changed all THAT much within the past ten years. I mean, you have to keep up with the software and operating systems. You went from Cat3 to Cat 5 to Cat6. You deployed a few wireless access points in your network. You started issuing laptops with encryption software. But when it comes down to it, not a whole lot has changed. You still support the user, make sure your network and data is secure, and battle the occasional virus outbreak. You still use Ghost or some similar product to image or reimage a machine. SMS and SCCM and similar products have certainly helped us in deploying patches and software, but this has turned from a high-school grad going out and blindly installing software on a customer's machine to having a team of people to script, package, test, and deploy packages, and to detect and correct broken clients.
New technologies will come along that you will have to pick up and learn, but the IT department isn't going anywhere, and anyone who thinks this is deluded.
I used to joke with my profs way back in school. I told them that by the end of my career I expect to have to talk the computer system into doing it's job today. Because they would become so complex that they basically had a personalty and we would need some psych courses to make it in IT.
I don't know about anyone else but I still get people coming into the IT room asking questions.
:), All this while we try to do more and more with less and less IT money. I think they will still need the tech who can keep everything running smooth and all the various devices talking to each other. Security, configuration, maintenance and repair will be with us for awhile.
What phone should I get?
Do you know a good laptop I can buy for my kid?
I think my personal PC got infected, can you fix it?
Can you synch my Itunes playlists with all these devices?
I try to stay educated on all the new smart phones, decent laptop deals, repair of older PCs
Of course, if you're one of those dark IT dudes who still thinks you are in charge of the main frame and all users are idiots, your future is limited.
Embrace the change, we are in the middle of a Technological Revolution. Just like the Agricultural and the Industrial Revolutions.
Almost everything I know today will probably be worthless in a year.
We've been hearing for over a decade that wireless will make infrastructure specialists the new Cobol programmer. BS! Why hasn't this happened? Because going wireless implies a whole host of security and interoperability issues that are inherent to wireless. A corporation would be mad to place their critical data infrastructure in a shared media like 802.11A/B/G,. 4G and WiMax are still lightyears away from being as reliable and fast as current copper and fiber technologies.
No matter how fast and error resistant the state-of-the-art wireless technology is, there are limits dictated by the laws of physics that govern how much data you can squeeze through a given wireless spectrum in a given physical space. With physical mediums like copper and fiber, I'm only limited by how many runs I can cram into a given space, plus, I have physical control over data. And how my neighbor is using their copper/fiber is completely irrelevant, which is quite unlike current wireless technologies.
Beyond this. proper wireless infrastructure design is an order of magnitude more difficult to get right than physical infrastructure (ignoring slack-jawed installers who make stupid decisions). Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant beyond comparison or a damned liar.
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
My grandfather was a telegraph operator for the railroad in the early part of the 20th century. It was a fairly highly skilled occupation for the time. When official communications were not going up and down the line, the operators sent messages to each other. I have a few of them from around 1915. These young men were like young men of other ages -- they talked mostly about sports and girls. They were like text messages of today. Highly skilled as they were, within a few years they would be completely obsolete, being replaced by telephones. I think many of us in IT are the "telegraph operators" of our time.
Proverbs 21:19
... programming languages will remain, JavaScript and Cobol.
What are we migrating? We'd be migrating to this cloud crap in the first place.
You're seriously telling me that you can move 240 gigs over a 2meg pipe in 14 hours?
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
One of the main things about "cloud" is that you can "spin up" a server image in some professionally-managed (you hope) data center and put whatever on it. There is plenty of talk about "private clouds," which is where you have in-house servers running VMWare or Xen or something like that, where you can "spin up" new server images on your existing hardware.
Companies have been building intranets, which use Internet-type services but run internally. Private clouds are merely "clouds" which run internally. Those are NOT going away.
There are simply too many questions about security and reliability with publicly-available clouds. And, as many others have pointed out, there's a bandwidth bottleneck when you put heavily-used services somewhere outside of your building.
I do see an increasing amount of "Bring Your Own Device" in businesses. People are using personally-owned cellphones to connect to company directories, e-mail and the like. The problem I see what this is that you have to let your employer have admin rights on your device. If your cellphone gets stolen, they need a way to ensure that your credentials, stored on the phone, aren't used to access proprietary corporate data. I'm pointedly NOT accessing the corporate e-mail system through my phone because I'm NOT comfortable with giving someone else admin rights on a device for which I'm paying, and which holds a great deal of my personal data.
Consequently, a middle ground will need to evolve. You will need a way to use your iPad or Android-based tablet to connect to company data, in secure fashion, and be able to use it, but keep NO data permanently stored on the device.
There is already a system out there which allows you to "drive" apps on one device but run them on another machine, using the CPU, RAM, storage, etc. of the other, possibly faster, machine. And I'm talking finer granularity than PCAnywhere, or RDP or VNC.
X-Windows
You can have a desktop on the machine you're physically using, driving multiple applications which are actually running on other machines. You can be using some wimply little thin client, but running 5 different apps on 5 different, server-class, application servers. Each application server hosts one (or more) app(s), not an entire desktop. Citrix will let you do something similar. Sun had some really sophisticated software which would do this, too; you could run Linux-based apps next to Windows-based apps, driving all of them from a thin client. You could connect multiple thin clients together, giving you multiple screens and the system would automatically scale your desktop to handle all of the screens. I haven't looked too closely since Oracle acquired them, so I'm not sure if the software and thin clients are still available.
Take this to the next level. You bring your tablet to work. You connect with the corporate wifi and make a secure connection to the application servers. Your "start" menu (or something like it) populates with apps you can use. You use the user interface on your tablet to drive them, but the apps are actually running on server-class app servers within the company. The data stays on the servers, your tablet is little more than a dumb, graphics terminal. You aren't constrained by the CPU in your tablet. Low CPU usage = long battery life (assuming you can come up with some kind of low-power-consumption wifi).
You travel on business. You use existing wifi (or cellular data) infrastructure and VPN into the company network. Your apps appear. You do what you need to do. Not as responsive, because there is more latency, but still usable.
If you take a laptop on business, it doesn't matter if some TSA bonehead feels the need to confiscate it. No data is stored on the laptop. It is just a mobile thin client. And, if it's company provided, you probably shouldn't have any personal data on there.
If you have a desktop machine at the office, with wired networking, it hits the same set of app servers. Consquently, your apps are consistent between the des
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
One thing that I have not read much about in this discussion is the importance of backups and how they will influence IT in the coming years. While company's like Mozi (VMWare) and Carbonite offer an online solutions, not many businesses fall into a model that would support such backups. Many industries have regulating bodies that oversee them that would not allow customer or patient data to float into the cloud. Additionally, businesses that have a lot of data with a lot of changes to backup often cannot transfer fast enough to these services to make them a viable option. The first duty of any IT department is to the data of the company. Customers still need help securing their data in a reliable, readily accessible format. While the price of storage is always shrinking, the software and services to keep data are increasing in cost. Emphasis will still need to be placed on backups 10 years from now or 100 years from now.
Parent made mention of half a TB and 100Mb link, so that's what I did the math off. Also, you don't have to do a big bang approach, migrate user by user or duplicate their mailboxes then you can move them in seconds.
What if the "cloud" provider or otherwise outsourcer has better hardware / backup / change management than you do? At what point does the solution stop being "crap"?
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Big risks require big rewards
When you watch the news, do the words coming out of the pretty lady's mouth make any sense to you? At all?
When has a major corporation taken any major risk lately? The whole platform of late is that the economy won't start moving again until we remove risk from the marketplace. When a major campaign contributor has a boo-boo, we rush to flood them with free cash, deeming them "too important to leave to the vagaries of the marketplace."
The whole problem with our economy is that there is no risk -- at all. We haven't held the wealthy accountable in this country since the 60s.
Meanwhile, we're sure as hell going to make sure Grandma doesn't get her medication and take the rest out of the hide of our teachers.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The rate at which immigrants become middle to upper middle class in the American society far outweigh the rate of average Americans.
God, you're hilarious. Most immigrants in this country live in exploited poverty. The few who arrive with money and connections do quite well, but you won't find any former field workers in the boardroom.
The fact that you can even think anything even close to your quote above means you filter so much out of your day-to-day perceptions that you're certifiably psychotic.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."