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."

Comments

Survey?

[Hsien-Ko]

The naivety into a fud survey disturbs me, not to mention the whole company dependence issue which could lead into a business trap backlash if one fails.

Cloud computing isn't going to kill anything.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

agree. I run a service desk. Cloud computing doesn't eliminate the morons using computers. Cloud computing won't change a thing except provide new challengers to my tier 1 techs.

Re:Survey?

[History's Coming To]

So you no longer need a computer to "access the cloud"? And here I was labouring under the impression that the majority of support jobs were related to hardware faults, OS problems, malware and user error, how "the cloud" will stop this happening is a mystery.

Re:Survey?

[CSMoran]

So you no longer need a computer to "access the cloud"? And here I was labouring under the impression that the majority of support jobs were related to hardware faults, OS problems, malware and user error, how "the cloud" will stop this happening is a mystery.

The dumber the terminal, the fewer hardware faults, OS problems and malware, no?
Although in practice we can expect a dumbing down of the user base too :).

Re:Survey?

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:Survey?

[kelemvor4]

So you no longer need a computer to "access the cloud"? And here I was labouring under the impression that the majority of support jobs were related to hardware faults, OS problems, malware and user error, how "the cloud" will stop this happening is a mystery.

The dumber the terminal, the fewer hardware faults, OS problems and malware, no? Although in practice we can expect a dumbing down of the user base too :).

At some point it's got to to run an OS, maybe on a backend server instead of a workstation but it's there. Where there's an OS and users, there will be malware. The hardware faults will transfer to "server" instead of the workstation. An interesting change will be that a hardware fault that takes down the box will impact multiple users instead of just one. You will get the benefit of redundancy if you're running a real server, though.

As an aside, we had cloud computing in the 80's and 90's. We called it Client-Server and used terminals connected to unix servers (in my case specifically, HP-UX). Now we're doing the same thing, just with different hardware and software.

Re:Survey?

[kelemvor4]

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.

Re:Survey?

[SuricouRaven]

Having really dumb terminals does simplify end support though. Computer not working? Pull it out, put in a new one. Send the old one back to the manufacturer. It means one IT worker can support many more computers, and needs less training thus lower pay. This is very good from a business perspective, but very bad for job satisfaction. Telecoms went through something like that when the old click-and-bang mechanical switches were replaced with solid state boards that were just swapped out, thus reducing highly skilled engineers to the role of 'pull anything with the fault light lit and stick in a new one.' A lot of them retired early.

Re:Survey?

[El Torico]

How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?

Re:Survey?

[Joce640k]

Yep, and it will stop the entire company from working when it happens.

Managers will start to think that individual PCs will prevent that...and we'll begin the circle of computing all over again. Just like the last time.

Re:Survey?

[JazzHarper]

Indeed. Stupidity is bottomless. You can get dizzy gazing into it.

Re:Survey?

[MightyYar]

How many times will you hear, "The cloud is down!"?

Does that make it a fog?

Re:Survey?

[gtall]

Hmmm...and thus the Distributed Cloud was born in the year 2016. Before that, cloud services were centralized and so were downtimes. Managers felt that this was a denial of service to the worker bees and in order to keep them happy, a distributed form of cloud service was necessary. In the new concept, individual PCs will perform cloud services for individual worker bees...at their OWN desk. Hailed as a remarkable productivity enhancer that made men stronger and women prettier, Management declared Victory with Honor and many awards were passed out. The Business World heaved a sigh of relief that the cloud scourge had been fixed. Techies merely heaved.

Re:Survey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it an effing rest, will ya? We're talking about computers not polictics.

Re:Survey?

[CAIMLAS]

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).

Re:Survey?

[TWX]

Doubtful on all observations. What I really see, is everyone trying to use cell phones like they would a computer. Roughly translated, that means that the business world will run to programmers to sort out their fuzzy-wuzzy-dohicky needs. Most people loath analytical thinking. I don't mean they aren't interested. They HATE it.

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.

What a bunch of useless buzzwords

[rebelwarlock]

There's no article here. It's just a bunch of marketing crap.

Will the cloud magically train users?

[brokeninside]

I worked in desktop support for a number of different companies. (I've also done software testing, and programming.) Currently, I do end user support for a vertical software package.

Anyway, in ten years across four different firms supporting everything from commodity hardware to custom software, one thing has remained constant. Most support calls aren't for the sort of configuration and installation issues that the cloud solves. Rather, most support calls are for users that are unable (or unwilling) to read the manual or to show the user how to do things that are either too basic or too complicated to have been included in the manual.

Moving to the cloud isn't going to magically make a user understand the difference between a short cut and a file. Nor is it going to explain to them what those numbers in that report that hits that one table in the database means.