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.

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.

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?

End of line

[RubberDogBone]

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.

Re:End of line

[pstorry]

Having been in the job market myself recently, here's a few pointers...

Skills are good, accomplishments are better. The skills are usually just there to get you past the filter - once your resume is being read (not skimmed) by a human, the accomplishments are what will matter.

In the current market, integration and automation are the kings. If you think it can be done in the cloud, then assume it is being done in the cloud - and forget doing that as a job. The very best case will be that you integrate with it.

If you work in Windows environments, you need to brush up on PowerShell. If you work in *NIX, then you'd think bash/python/perl should be your focus - but I'd suggest you get familiar with puppet/chef etc., because I didn't see a single job that required *NIX skills that didn't also require or express an interest in using a puppet-like system to automate configurations.

There are some migration jobs out there - migrating users to O365 etc. Those jobs will pay bills for the next couple of years, but will dry up for obvious reasons. Feel free to take one in the short term, but keep looking for something else in the background if you do.

Otherwise, throw your skills into some search engines and see what happens.

Oh, and good luck. I hope you find a decent job...

Re:Disturbing

[Anon-Admin]

It's not that we are denying it. It's that we have seen it before.

Windows NT was going to eliminate the need for corporate IT. It is so simple that the secretary can manage the system. (Yes, Microsoft sales used that as a selling point)

Central server management was going to eliminate corporate IT. It would be so simple you just have to hire a person to push a button and the problem is fixed.

Self Healing systems are going to eliminate the need for Corporate IT. The systems will detect an issue and heal without the need for IT personnel.

Outsourcing to India will eliminate the need for Corporate IT. You outsource all your systems and management to a data center and share the cost of the infrastructure while getting the best of the best to work on it.

Now, Clouds are going to eliminate the need for Corporate IT.

History shows that each has been wrong. Dont misunderstand, each did some small part of what they claimed but over time it all becomes more expensive and less productive.

Clouds are no different!

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.