Slashdot Mirror
What an IT Career Will Look Like 5 Years Out
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Paul Heltzel reports on the impact that IT's increasing reliance on the cloud for IT infrastructure will have on your career in the years ahead. "[O]ne fact is clear: Organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, most IT pros who've pulled all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems while co-workers slept, probably won't recognize their offices' IT architecture — or the lack thereof — in five years. This shift will have a broad impact on IT's role in the future — how departments are structured (or broken up), who sets the technical vision (or follows it), and which skills rise to prominence (or fall away almost entirely)."
Careers, at least as we used to know them, are mostly gone now. We won't see them again any time soon. Even the industry that the federal government so lovingly bailed out back in 2010 has been laying off plenty of IT workers in recent times, and they were amongst the most stable places for IT "careers" before now. If you want to be able to retire at some point before you die, you need to be constantly looking for other job opportunities. Move up, move down, move laterally; it doesn't matter. Just keep moving or you'll be under the chopping block.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Whole organizations will be reliant on whole other organizations, who may go out of business on the random, or get swallowed up by competitors of whole organizations(1).
In reality a hosted cloud is more expensive and less secure in almost all cases. When will people wake up and realize that cloud was created not to provide any particular service that can't be provided locally, but is just a way to turn something you used to pay for once into a monthly forever and ever payment. Cloud is cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I've been a programmer/senior engineer for 30 years; never swapped out a drive, pulled a cable or plugged in a server at work.
Seriously?
Wonder how many more times we're going to hear of cloud architectures being compromised before that idiotic mentality changes.
There will be less of them. Already most corp IT is not IT but vendor management the cloud move is going from outside vendors taking care of your inhouse IT shop to outside vendors taking care of your cloud IT shop.
Overall this is a good thing boil down the IT staff to the real people and boil off the fluff. Give it a decade and watch core business functions go back in house as companies figure out a one size fits all is to ridged.
No sir I dont like it.
"Organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the cloud." /Schrute
FALSE
This assumes all kinds of organizations are moving any portion to the cloud. Some organizations will never, ever, give up control of their IT infrastructure to external companies. Especially cloud providers. And by that, I mean cloud providers won't be using the cloud unless they're a ponzi-scheme style provider.
A rep from a cloud services company.
Nothing to see here.
if we follow this vision what little IT staff remains will still get the blame when the cloud fails.
On blank 3.5" floppy drives, and wallets to hold them.
People keep saying this to me. "Oh we won't need your type in a few years because cloud everything." Never mind the fact that around 99% of my work is software-based. I only rarely on occasion mess with hardware. Every 5 years for a hardware refresh, and the occasional drive swap from a vendor. Everything else I do is software-based. And it really doesn't matter whether it's "in the cloud", or "on premise". My job role stays the same. So I save a whole 15 minutes a year on not having to swap drives.
What you will see with "cloud", just like "virtualization", is a maturation of the technology's use inside a company. Not every workload is appropriate for virtualization, and not every workload will be appropriate nor cost effective in the cloud. The cloud is great for every "devops" guy who thinks they're going to write the next Facebook, Amazon, or Netflix--but yet again, for 99% of companies out there, workloads are entirely static. There's just little need for "SUPER HYPER SCALE AUTOSCALING UP AND DOWN CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE" for a vast majority of business workloads.
Specific applications are hugely appropriate for "cloud", particularly e-mail (and I say this as an Exchange Administrator). And for these "we need this up 110% of the time" applications, they'll find that if the "cloud vendor" has a problem there's nobody they can call to fix the issue. And never underestimate the value of management having someone that they can call to "look at the issue right away at 2:30AM". This need will keep a lot of folks employed.
Finally, you can't really depreciate cloud assets like you can capital expenses. So really, again, you're ultimately just comparing the cost of operating a datacenter versus the cloud technology. And you can already not worry about operating your own datacenter by simply using a colocated one.
So at the end of the day, no matter how much technology changes. No, the 'devops' revolution isn't actually going to happen, and being able to swap a drive or add some ram will still be a necessary skill.
"The cloud" is not a magic carpet, and there are a lot of organizations who will get burned by falling for all the hype. I personally know a cloud based service provider that actually believed the marketing crap on reliability. When their cloud provider (one of the big two) crashed they had no backup and no recovery plan either. They were flat on their back for a week, and were still picking up the pieces a month after that. One more of those and they might just shut their doors.
So here is another fad, and the inevitable backlash will come when it fails to deliver. So how dumb do you have to be to announce the start of a brand new shiny paradigm shift that will make everything really different in a blink of an eye. Grow up.
Why is Snark Required?
Now you have skills or not.
Companies hire based on skills, and that's it pretty much.
You will have to fence for your own skill turf (don't wait for being taught in school / university - tech changes too fast for them to be relevant in the long run).
The cloud is a new service, for some it will be economical and for others it won't be. If the cloud was really changing IT companies like IBM, HP and Microsoft etc would be tanking. They're not so these clowns are just trying to convince you to part with your cash. Yes the cloud will mean the mum and dad companies can run their IT services in the Interwebs however bigger companies will still see the break even point for running their own infrastructure with maybe their backup web presence in the cloud when and if it makes sense. In the final analysis money talks and bullshit walks.
At our school, here's the list of stuff we pushed into the cloud in the last few years:
Student information system (attendance, grades, IEPs, lesson plans - the lot). This eliminated an RDP server farm and a couple of SQL servers.
Email - this eliminated a couple of Exchange Servers.
Student data storage and applications - Google Apps eliminated most of our Windows and Mac student workstations. Chromebooks are cheap and easy.
Firewalls/VPN - management of these devices is now in the cloud - goodbye to local firmware updates and far more flexible provisioning of devices.
MDM - no longer in-house.
In each case we realized cost savings simply due to sharing someone else's infrastructure instead of home-brewing our own. Security concerns in the cloud are overblown by those trying to save their jobs. The fact is that most small to medium size businesses can not afford to have the security talent that most cloud companies have.
We don't make our own water or power - why should we try to build all of our IT?
I can see the writing on the wall, from the perspective of having my first IT job in 1983... It's over.
No one should really seek to enter a non development position in IT. Because it is being snuffed out by "big computing cloud services" and the "appliancezation" of IT infrastructure. There will always be some high end jobs around. But the numbers (and the pay) are shrinking- fast.
So pack it up kiddies. Almost 30 years of booming industry will be evaporating in 5 to 7 years.
It is truly time to find something else to do.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Most on prem IT will be a glorified helpdesk unless you have some other overriding cost or the size to keep it in-house, its been happening for awhile in bits and drabs. Most of the proposals I've been working on deal with some aspect of the Cloud, or pushing data to it. Just like how the Security Assessment Process is moving to to Continuous Monitoring. Where is the infrastructure/hosting? In the cloud of course. Costs dictate this.
Telephones - we pushed that out as well. Gone are the expensive PITA PBX systems. Now we drop an IP phone into a classroom or on a desk - a few mouse clicks and we're done.
I disagree with many of the precepts of the cloud and these types of articles. From a technical aspect, the cloud is simply incapable of delivering much of what traditional IT infrastructure delivers in house. I keep thinking or hoping that my very real contentions with cloudy services will be illustrated by outages, security breaches, latency, lack of integration... But, even when large incidents do occur, which I admit is rare, people don;t seem to mind at all. The drum beat continues and people continue to migrate to the cloud.
The thing is that no matter how I feel about it, there can be no denying that there is a groundswell movement to the cloud. It is happening yesterday, today and tomorrow. It is happening, the media is proselytizing it, the vendors are building it and the traditional vendors are either dying or shifting to cloud only products. The file server chugging away in the dusty closet of most small businesses is almost completely gone, already. It's happening for the wrong reasons and I still think I'll be prove correct. One day...
But, the thing I find really disturbing is the Slashdot crowd. The technology elite that have historically blazed the trails in IT are all here in the echo chamber denying that it's happening, that its going to happen. They're sticking their fingers in their ears an posting lalalalalalalalalalal. I want to agree with these people, but I can't. The cloud thing is fully underway. I'd estimate that it's 50% or more of the way there, right now. Denying it is ridiculous, but people aren't presenting a cogent argument against it.
In 5 years it is likely that the world will be mostly cloud. I think it will also be the beginning of the revolution, back to the old way. But, that is to be seen. For now, you eoither need to realize that it is happening or present a public and cogent argument against it. Lalalalalala isn't convincing anyone of anything other than that your position needs to be eliminated.
More geographically concentrated. At least it has been my experience for the jobs I look for in software development about 80-90% of jobs are in major cities. You can find a job pretty much everywhere but the big companies hiring dozens of developers at a time overwhelm the one or two positions smaller companies in smaller communities are hiring. You switch jobs you either find another job in the big city you are in or you move 1hr + away (I'm from Canada: huge country, vastly distributed major cities). I think IT is going to become more like that too. You'll still need the low level support in house but the large number of jobs will be concentrated into areas with huge datacentres. In this case likely more rural locations because of cheap power, colder climate, cheap land etc.
Got laid off yesterday from an IT job I'd had for almost 15 years. Small company so I did a lot of things, from hardware to software to physical security, to sweeping the floors to to taking boxes of mail to the post office at midnight. If it needed to be done, I was the guy to get,
So now this middle-aged man is suddenly out of work and looking at an IT field that is already vastly different than it was even five years ago much less fifteen. I don't have a clue what I am going to do. What I know how to do is of rapidly decreasing value and/or there are kids who will do it cheaper.
I have no idea what I am going to do. Savings and severance will carry for a while but I've got to make a pivot to do something entirely different which pays well. My job may be gone but naturally the bills aren't.
Sig for hire.
Information Technology covers an incredibly wide range of careers, only a small portion of which are system/network administration related. Yes, in some organizations, the "cloud" may reduce the need for traditional SAs, but it is simply the latest in a long-term trend of reduction in force for that sector.
Automation has already decimated the SA workforce. Long gone are the days when companies needed armies of SAs to maintain datacenters of servers. The datacenters are still there, but are being maintained by much smaller teams of SAs using automation rather than manpower. Many large corporations who haven't (and won't) embrace the cloud, have already gotten rid of their SA staff, relying instead on vendors like HP to provide both hardware and SA level support as a bundled package. There are still SAs, of course, but they increasingly work for one of the main vendors, rather than being distributed throughout many corporations.
Although lots of IT services lend themselves well to cloud solutions, not all do.
The job will evolve to take advantage of the new developments in tech, like it always has. Like how to this day, most companies that I worked for still have phone systems, because frankly it's cheaper than having a phone line for each and every employee.
Also going cloud still requires you to have a local LAN and somebody to manage it. And firewall. And ISP. This requirement is going nowhere anytime soon.
What will vanish is (and I would argue has already vanished) is small companies (50 or less) having to have a full time IT guy to manage their stuff. But this is not cost free, as I used to see a lot of these companies during my consulting days falling into complete chaos and dissaray because cloud providers don't usually manage your workstations or make sure your employees are following the processes and business practices your company relies on. Some went back to having their own in-house IT because of it.
A huge chunk of sys admins will be absorbed into cloud providers. And some positions will also be eliminated. This is to be expected.
Biggest issue we face in the IT industry (IMHO of course) is more that companies like Google, Apple, M$ and others pressuring universities and colleges to expand their CS/IT programs and issue a related diploma to people who just look at the curriculum. They also keep spreading the propaganda that it is a hot industry (drawing in suckers) and keep pressuring the government to allow in more H1Bs (aka digital slave labor) all to drive down IT salary costs.
Someone has to assemble these computers and repair them, replace the hard drives etc.
With cloud you're paying overhead and profits on all of the things your IT guy has to do anyway. Your virtual host still needs hard drives and expansions and software updates. Swapping a hard drive once in a while is not a big deal.
Cloud is great if you only need very small quantities of something, perhaps for testing or a resource you only use once in a while. If your core business is dependent on it, unless you have a small company that can't afford a full time IT guy, you pretty much can host, colocate or rent your own stuff cheaper than an entire cloud stack.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It won't evaporate. Back in the '70s lines were slow (1200 bps when really lucky) and mainframes were slow. Minicomputers and later personal computers were cheaper and performed better. Now the trend has inverted: lines are fast and big irons are way better than anything you can buy at reasonable prices. Computing is now a service. So no, sorry for you, this is the way it will play out. It only makes sense. You don't have your own power station, do you? And you won't have any internal IT department. And good riddance!
I recently transitioned from an older established company to a startup.
former employer / older company:
rarely trust outside services unless it's something super complex or necessary
test backup strategy regularly
encrypt everything
new employer / startup:
has the mentality that you trust 3rd party services and cloud providers above your own ability to code
has never tested backup strategy
have an issue? submit a ticket and wait
The reason the startup prefers using cloud and 3rd party services has nothing to do with quality - It's all about avoiding liability.
The rest of the time you are configuring applications, setting permissions and troubleshooting. Is your cloud provider going to be doing all this for you?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Back in the day (60s,70s,80s) "The Cloud" was called "Timesharing" on Mainframes. "The cloud" does not eliminate infrastructure, it just moves it to another company that you pay fees to. There will always be IT pros "pulling all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems", but they will be working for the cloud hosting companies (and probably be offshore). Also, chances are that companies with stable infrastructure needs that don't expand and contract all that much (which is most companies) would of saved money overall if they owned their own equipment instead of renting capacity from a cloud company. After all, the cloud company has to pay for all the same things *and* make a profit (often a very substantial profit), which will be reflected in their fees.
Undoubtably, the cloud has already started to reduce the number of server and storage engineer jobs out there. I'm already starting to see the handwriting on the wall and I'm thinking it might be time to retrain as a network administrator/engineer. With services going to the cloud, the role of the network engineer is only going to become more and more important and I'm just a server guy. Soon, I'll be handing out happy stickers at Walmart.
With the mass outsourcing and H1B visas being issued, IT jobs won't exist in 5 years.
At least for US Citizens.
The cloud as it is today is just a much more flexible version of colocation. The problems don't disappear, they're just moved around. Hardware management is just one piece of the puzzle -- the rest is getting the jumble of stuff working and keeping it running. The bigger challenges are getting the provider to care when something does go awry, and controlling costs which can balloon unexpectedly. Unfortunately, the MBAs are in control, and the cloud vendors are currently promising that all these problems disappear. Worse, naysayers appear like they're protecting their jobs to the average person from the business side, so any concerns are dismissed out of hand.
Either way, cloud or no cloud, what I see happening is the decline of traditional data center jobs and the rise of integration experts. I wear lots of hats - I'm in systems integration and so I have to know a little bit about everything; my specialty is end user systems. Just like coders who can only write for the web framework they learned in coder bootcamp, IT people who know only their little corner of the environment are going to have a tougher time finding work. Previously, you could have a very lucrative string of contract work just being an expert-level EMC administrator or Cisco network guy. I know someone who is a savant-level genius on Windows group policy, of all things. There was (and still is, for now) so much proprietary knowledge in just one of these little subfields that a full career could be built out of it. Is software-defined networking or storage just a buzzword? You might think that, but cloud providers and even on-premises equipment vendors are embracing it. I know a few Cisco engineers -- some are networking geniuses and will thrive in any environment, and frankly, some of them know the Cisco stuff and that's pretty much it.
Career-wise, I see a lot more turbulence as release cycles keep getting shrunk down, SaaS starts taking over completely, etc. Companies have been doing everything in their power to promote the "gig economy", cheered on by fans of Uber and others. This has led to a drop in the number of full time IT employees, so increasingly, people have had to resort to stringing contracts together to make a "career." My secret so far has been to be the "make it work" guy, knowing enough about the end to end system to know where a problem lies. Even if I don't know how to fix that piece, I can find who does and talk intelligently to them about it. All I know is this -- even if it's not totally stable, as long as it pays enough, I would much rather have a job where I'm constantly learning new things than a report-pusher job. Most people who are suited for IT work are like this. I'm not a 23-year-old newbie either, who will happily work 80 hour weeks because they don't know any better. In fact, being older has its advantages. I've worked very hard on long-term projects only to have them canned for stupid reasons. It sucks but as long as you acquired a new skill along the way, and can adapt, that makes it better.
And you won't have any internal IT department. And good riddance!
What happened sysadmin tell you your not allowed to watch netflix anymore?
I currently admin around 500 servers for a large company. Of these servers there are maybe 10 groupings of 5 that are similar, otherwise they are totally different. Different products, different solutions for different departments. Am I to believe that I will be replaced by 460 different cloud services? They will need me just to keep it straight!
"The Cloud" is a buzzword created to fool executives into paying for Other People's servers. Executives see it as some magical technology that is fool proof and infallible.
The term should be eradicated, preferably with fire.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...most of the comments are IT people trying to convince other IT people that their jobs are safe/worth it/etc. Nice echo chamber you got here guys.
The cloud is better, faster, cheaper, deal with it.
Maybe recycle yourself into making private clouds à la OpenStack?
Same thing was said 5 years ago. I still have my job. Keep trying though.
Career Is But A Quait Concept Now
Using the word Career instead of Job is more important than ever, IMHO. In past decades career development was simply finding a good company and moving up the ranks. Having a career was basically just the same as having a job. In today's economy, managing your career is much more difficult. But because it is more difficult, it is far more rewarding for those who do it well (and more hazardous for those who do it poorly).
Move up, move down, move laterally; it doesn't matter. Just keep moving
This is very good advice for most people. The more you move, the more varied experiences you will have. It is far better to have 10 years of actual experience than 1 year of experience repeated 10 times. There will be rare times when you will be promoted within a company (my first move to Senior Developer along with a 30% raise was a promotion), but "promotions" will be far more rapid when switching companies.
And the most important benefit of moving between jobs is gaining more varied experiences. You see more people doing things right, and more people doing things wrong. If you ask the right questions during interviews, you can ensure you will be part of more interesting projects, instead of being put on some sun-setting maintenance project.
Once you gain enough experience, you get the job security back since you are so much more valuable than the workers who stayed at a company for 20 years.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It won't evaporate. You don't have your own power station, do you? And you won't have any internal IT department. And good riddance!
Bad example. Pretty much everyone here has a battery in a laptop that sits on a desk 99% of the time, and most of us have a UPS for our gear, so yeah, we do have our own power stations.
As for internal IT support... You may not have a line item for an IT guy, but you are paying for it in hidden costs. Every hour an employee spends trying to figure something out on their own instead of asking a friendly, skilled IT guy who can solve it in two minutes is a 30x waste of resources.
Go work at a Cloud Service Provider...you know..since they'll HAVE all that pesky physical IT infrastructure...
As most of you are aware, there are important cloud based extensions in the popular web browsers. I'm speaking, of course, of the "Cloud To Butt" extensions, which replace all instances of the word "cloud" with the word "butt". This replacement is truly revolutionary, and it discriminates not- even the text "clout to butt" becomes "butt to butt"!
There is a version for Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webs...
And the functionality is also on Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
So here are some highlights from THIS thread:
After all, the butt company has to pay for all the same things *and* make a profit (often a very substantial profit), ...
...Butts are going to eliminate the need for Corporate IT...
A huge chunk of sys admins will be absorbed into butt providers.
...the butt is simply incapable of delivering...
...you pretty much can host, colocate or rent your own stuff cheaper than an entire butt stack...
Many large corporations who haven't (and won't) embrace the butt...
With services going to the butt, the role of the network engineer is only going to become more and more important...
Butt is cheaper up front, but almost always more expensive in duration.
And our winner...
If you think it can be done in the butt, then assume it is being done in the butt- and forget doing that as a job.
Follow the herd. Store your data in somebody else's box. Trust encryption that you don't understand, and that is guaranteed to obsolete with the next big jump in computing technology.
What could possibly go wrong?
Wow. That is possibly the dumbest thing I have read on here. Keep moving, or you will get fired? Who is going to hire someone who keeps switching jobs constantly? I'm sure you will be modded to +5 Insightful though.
Where have you been in the last 15-20 years? The IT/software industry moved towards a contractor-base system years ago, where layoffs are a common occurrence every 2-5 years, with up/down cycles lasting 5 to 10. Outside of SV, it is rare to find a perm opening, let alone a place where you can spend 10 years on the job uninterrupted.
Nowadays, it is just contracting jobs. Even the health and DoD sectors (sectors I've worked with in addition to others) have been moving towards that modus operandi.
That you act surprised like this tells me that you are either new to this shit or you are in a very special niche. Nothing wrong with the later if your niche is a highly technical one (otherwise you are just playing a "Dodo on an island" role completely unaware of changes around you - not a good place to be.)
None of this shit works without a correctly configured, working network. In short order that network will have to transport ipv6 as well as legacy ipv4, and ipv4 will - indeed must - go away. There will be acres of physical network plant to organize, manage, upgrade & replace. Locally hosted apps will be niche apps, for those things which aren't in the cloud yet or that you don't want to put there, e.g. 911 systems, (air) traffic control, anything realtime that can't stand latency, and anything connected to a sick human being.
You've got my attention. Can you tell us how big your school is? Can you describe how much bandwidth you require and how you manage it and redundancy?
A couple of hundred or thousand students and staff watching videos, reading lessons, streaming desktop office apps, running SIP trunks for internal and external calls, all sounds like a huge amount of bandwidth and dependency on internet reliability,
Also, what are your VPNs for? If everything is already in the cloud, why do people VPN into your school?
My comment about the cloud won an award from the cloud! :-)
I'm perversely proud that the cloud will have a permanent record of my cloud comment. You made my day, thank you for sharing your cloud to butt knowledge with us all.
We have FIOS and Comcast cable connecting our locations. We haven't had a significant internet connectivity failure in years.
If we did have a reliability problem with our network providers, we would account for that with redundant internet connections.
This isn't the 90s anymore. Internet connectivity is pretty reliable - and many areas do have more than one choice of network provider.
I was a network manager at a small community bank. We also had FIOS/DSL/Cable interconnecting our sites - and we had a channelized DS3 as a backup.
Granted, we had almost all of our systems in-house, but many many of our competitors were "serviced" banks in that they had very few IT system in-house. Those companies also had redundant network connectivity.
The cloud is simply a way to cost-share someone else's computer. Your network design should have reliability built in whether your IT is cloud based or in-house if your business requires high availability.
Having a crappy internet connection has nothing to do with cloud VS in-house. Especially if your enterprise spans multiple locations.
You can't differentiate between power generation and power storage? If you're an example of IT competence, I'm glad we're moving everything to the cloud and getting rid of you chumps.
IT was never needed beyond the initial set up. Computer programs run just fine for years on end, computer hardware lasts much longer than most companies replacement cycles. You only need IT when you want new features or functionality. Problem is users want more of it then ever, as computing becomes cheaper, more and more will be demanded to do more things.
What will IT smell like in 5 years?
Answer: body odour and stale curry.
This is merely because hardware has been fairly stagnant for years now. Cycles are turning into a fungible commodity again and therefore hardware prices are being driven down. In the 1970s it was similar, but Moore's Law was devaluing it at a rapid pace, while network connections were still slow. Eventually the Big Iron that was managed by groups of highly trained people in clean rooms couldn't compete.
However, you're deluded if you think fast and reliable lines are cheap. They're not. This is why anything involving large quantities of data is staying local... The easy stuff that was designed decades ago for those slow links are the only low-hanging fruit that have experienced a strong shift to outsourced service ("cloud") providers due to the fact that they do not depend on a big pipe. Email, documents, and spreadsheets are one thing; terabytes of data are completely different... "Cloud" services are only good for easy problems.
Do you want fries with that?
I've been in higher ed IT for over 20 years. We have our own data center but the all magical cloud is alluring to the business-y people because it seems to be cheaper. We've taken the bait on a few services. The more stuff that goes up into the cloud, the more important reliable high bandwidth network infrastructure becomes. All business comes to a halt if that service is interrupted. The biggest question we encounter is with the intellectual property of our researchers. These guys and the financial support behind them are absolutely paranoid about corporate or state-sponsored espionage (and rightfully so). We can audit our internal systems, but a third party sure isn't going to want to tell us they've been compromised since it's bad for business.
The cloud services have a great bottom line appeal, but then when there are problems or support issues, we are at the mercy of that third party (and after the eager sales people make the deal, the support is less than stellar--at least lower in quality and expediency that we can provide in-house).
One hidden cost that many on our campus did not anticipate was the cost of tightening up computer life cycling so that the system requirements stay in spec. While the average corporation usually has this built into their budgets, colleges and universities are experiencing budget crunches and cut corners. Divisions on our campus that life-cycle computers every 5-10 years find themselves in a pickle when their computers don't meet the requirements. Of course, we IT folks like getting rid of the older more troublesome hardware, but the unexpected (or conveniently postponed) cost of doing business for that business unit tends to be painful. I suspect we're not the only university to encounter this--especially with a mixed platform environment like ours.