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)."

Comments

Career Is But A Quait Concept Now

[damn_registrars]

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.

Bonus Impact

[phmadore]

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).

And in most cases it is wrong

[rtkluttz]

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.

Re:And in most cases it is wrong

[coofercat]

From a business point of view, using the cloud means you get to put your monthly costs into your "op-ex" as opposed to buying a load of stuff up front (with cash) and writing it off over a couple of years on your "cap-ex". That can help your accounts look good because you get to maintain cash flow (particularly in the early days) and don't have lots of assets on the books. Not one single accountant that looks at your accounts will know if you're getting a good deal from your cloud or not, so it's works very well at impressing those sorts of people. Those sorts of people are quite probably your backers and bankers, who are increasingly risk adverse. They don't want to give you loads of cash today which all gets spent immediately (on the promise of success) and so would much rather drip-feed out their investment in you over a couple of years as they see success actually happening.

Going to the cloud means you don't need start-up capital to get started. In that sense it's very good and a great enabler of small business. However, as you say, once you've started up, you're better off taking the initial hit (from your cash reserve) to buy it all and run it in house. If you've got any sort of reputation to maintain, then moving stuff in-house is pretty much your duty of care (well, it is as soon as you lose your data and your customers complain about it). The question is... when are you no longer a "small business" that can be forgiven minor transgressions and "big enough" that you should know better? It seems to me that lots of really big corps. are trying to pretend they're "small" (ie. lean start-ups) when they absolutely should know better. We'll probably have to ride this out until the next 'fad' comes along.

Not really.

[magamiako1]

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.

IT as a utility - we're already there.

[zerofoo]

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?

Re:IT as a utility - we're already there.

[magamiako1]

And then your Internet connection goes out.

Re:We're still trusting the cloud?

[l3v1]

Problem is, when a company's own infrastructure gets compromised, they get fsckd, but when a 'cloud' provider gets compromised, everyone they host get fsckd.

Cloud Shmoud

[sycodon]

"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.