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IT Desktop Support To Be Wiped Out Thanks To Cloud Computing
An anonymous reader writes "Tech industry experts are saying that desktop support jobs will be declining sharply thanks to cloud computing. Why is this happening? A large majority of companies and government agencies will rely on the cloud for more than half of their IT services by 2020, according to Gartner's 2011 CIO Agenda Survey."
The sad part is nobody seems to remember we have been down this road before....show of hands, anybody remember the whole "thin client push" in the dot bomb days? I sure do, you had all these companies pushing "the net/server' would solve everything, all your IT needs and problems just poof! Gone. anybody else remember that? So what happened?
The exact same things that is gonna happen this time, worries about data security, having a whole office sitting on ass if the network ever goes down, lag and crappy hosted apps not being as good as rich desktop apps, which BTW none of these problems have been solved by replacing net or server with cloud. I guess history doomed repeat and all that.
Yep, and long before that we had unix terminals connected to a central host. "Cloud computing" will hit the enterprise, and in a few years the enterprise will move on to something else.
How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Individual PCs can prevent "everyone is down due to the cloud", even with a server-centric or even thinclient architecture. I've worked at such places where there hasn't been a single network-wide outage for periods of 6-8 months with regularity.
Guess what it means, though? You've got to:
* buy enough of the right kind of equipment
* hire the right people to manage said equipment
* hire enough people to maintain those systems
Short of catastrophic equipment failure, there are few reasons for such outages. A properly maintained environment doesn't have these problems (with any regularity).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's called "Bring Your Own Device" or "Bring Your Own Technology" depending on who you talk to.
Right now it's all the buzz in educational technology circles, as school districts think that it'll let them reduce their IT budgets while providing more access. The thing they fail to realize is that every major K12 educational software success story is backed by hundreds of failures because it's rare to find people that both know how to educate and know how to write good software. Programmers rarely actually know what the teacher and students truly need, and teachers write shit code and lack basic understanding of the client/server model. I've seen this with typing software, test scoring software, reading comprehension software, and all sorts of other packages that simply do not implement client/server where the user can log in at any workstation and do the task at hand. Hell, Accelerated Reader, one of the most widespread ed reading packages, ran on friggin' MacOS 9 boxes as a server well past the debut of OSX.
They want little johnny to be able to e-mail/sms/mms his answer to the electronic whiteboard so that the teacher can display his and everyone else's answers to talk about them. They fail to even grasp the possibility of little johnny e-mailing "suzie likes cocks!" to the board, or a semicompromising picture of the teacher when she had bent down to deal with some crap the students messed up, and not having good filtering. Sure, the kid can get into trouble for this kind of thing, but that doesn't stop the teacher from losing control of the class, permanently.
Cloud, BYOD, all crap. All marketing terms. All a bunch of HIPPOs who think they know best who refuse to speak with their actual IT staff when making decisions. They're going to spend a boatload of money to "save money" and in the end they're going to be back to buying more computers.
I've seen it before, and I'll see it again.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.