Cloud-Sourcing's Long-Term Impact On IT Careers 157
snydeq writes "InfoWorld provides a reality check on the impact cloud computing will have on IT jobs, the overall effects of which will likely resemble those of outsourcing, automation, and utility computing — in other words, a movement away from the nuts and bolts of technology toward the business end of the organization. This shift from 'blue-collar IT to white-collar IT' will be accompanied by greater demand for IT pros experienced with virtualization and Web scale-out deployments, even among midlevel organizations, and greater emphasis on SaaS integration among in-house development teams, analysts say. And though the large-scale impact of 'cloud-sourcing' is likely a decade away, those not versed in vendor contract management, cloud integration, analytics, and RIA and mobile development may find themselves pushed toward the less technical jobs to come, those that will require days full of conference calls and putting out fires caused by doing business in the cloud."
So, the replaceables are still replaceable (Score:4, Insightful)
and for the rest of us; business as normal. Got it.
Infoworld Idiocy (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when Bob Metcalfe was EIC, and when they sued Mark Stephens over the use of the pen name Robert X. Cringley.
I can't remember anything, any major direction, they were well informed or ahead of the curve on. Not one. I remember the Lotus Notes vs. Microsoft Exchange wars, I can't ever remember thinking 'Wow, Infoworld is really on top of this trend.' Can you?
As such, I wouldn't even read that claptrap about SaaS. It's fodder for CIO types to talk to CEO types about. Truth is, SaaS is evolutionary, not revolutionary. That's been true for everything in the past 20 years of computing.
Re:So, the replaceables are still replaceable (Score:5, Insightful)
When they came for the call support professionals, I remained silent.
When they came for the programmers there was no one left to speak out for me.
Slow Progression (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a slow progression to that point. Looking back 10 or 20 years ago today there have been significant advancements in technology and many game-changing technologies that never became mainstream. Even virtualisation has been held back by the 'needs' of the small and medium business - most have no need for it. The cloud will start in large enterprises and maybe trickle down to small businesses in some form or another, but we'll still need many IT techs at all levels of knowledge and organisation.
As long as businesses hold onto legacy software, advancement will be kept at a reasonable maximum. We still have accounting software that is 25 years old. Can we put that in the "Cloud"? Perhaps cloud computing or grid (like electricity utility) is where we are headed, but the jobs that is displaces will be filled in the "Cloud Industry".
I try to keep my feet wet in all aspects of IT regardless of the specific duties I'm performing at a job - this way I can at least have a taste for what I enjoy, what I'm capable of (programming, say) or where I might like to be in 10 years. As trends pick up, I'll devote more time to the fields which may have a better payoff in not only my personal life, but my professional life. I have dabbled enough in virtualisation to become proficient, but I am no expert - mainly because I, or the company I am at, have little to no use for it at the moment, but I realize the possibility my next job may have for it.
What the Industry sometimes fails to realize is that it is IT people who make or break the products. From the majority of /, readers responses to all these Cloud Computing posts, the main concerns are reliability and security. Reliability may be solved soon, but I feel security will always be a neverending list of crackers and incompetence on the part of the cloud utility. Too many stories of losing usb keys, laptops, security passes, passwords, etc, on the part of large "no fail" companies that should know better. Most businesses will be very very adverse to giving up control of their data, and somehow I don't see that ever changing, even when they claim the risk is almost 0%.
Re:So, the replaceables are still replaceable (Score:3, Insightful)
Blue collar??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone, anywhere, ever, has considered an IT worker 'blue collar'.
Re:SOX HIPPA etc (Score:5, Insightful)
While "Cloud" computing is here to stay, it is a while off
Cloud computing isn't here to stay. It's the latest buzzword of an industry trying to generate revenue. Whatever happened to SaaS? Oh, still not really here is it? Or "Web Services?" In the end, its just another way to move data around... nothing really revolunatary. But hey, lots of pointed haired people said "OMG our product needs to have / use Web services, it will change everything!" Ya, did it?
re: My friend used to refer to I.T. workers as .. (Score:5, Insightful)
.. gray collar, because much of I.T. lies in this fuzzy area between blue and white collar job descriptions.
On one hand, you need to have education and intelligence above what's typically needed for a "blue collar" job. (I realize there are plenty of jobs, like various areas of construction, where one needs to use their brain, have some math skills, etc. etc. But they probably re-use the same basic set of skills for years, as long as they specialize in the same job, like flooring installation, or drywalling, or ??) With I.T., everything changes regularly -- if for no other reason, simply because companies need excuses to keep reselling people the same items they already bought 2 or 3 years earlier. Also, the fact that I.T. workers usually work in climate-controlled office environments compares to the norm for a "white collar" position. All in all, I.T. workers are paid for their knowledge more than for their physical labor.
On the other hand, like a "blue collar" job, I.T. workers usually get stuck doing everything from cleaning dust and dirt out of the insides of workstations to crawling under tables and desks, along dirty floors, and climbing ladders to reach drop ceilings or duct-work, to get network cabling run. They may spend a good part of a workday un-boxing new systems, carrying them around to their destinations, and hooking up cables - plus carting off the old ones. They may be asked to clear printer jams, or go out on a shop floor in a factory environment, and disassemble equipment that has a computer board and processor at the heart of it (maybe even to fix an issue as simple as the CMOS battery having gone dead, so the BIOS no longer holds settings).
Uh huh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, of course, once we're all in the cloud, computers won't crash any more, LANs will just magically build themselves and the Internet will never go down.
Re:So, the replaceables are still replaceable (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because we all know everybody has a cow in their back yard and a generator in their basement.
Things change. Computing will become more utility like. Adapt or die.
The cloud isn't reducing complexity (Score:4, Insightful)
When the complexity of IT systems plateaus, becomes commoditized, then IT staff will indeed experience some fundamental shifts. As it is now, for every system that is commoditized, two or three more have increased in complexity.
Re:SOX HIPPA etc (Score:1, Insightful)
"Cloud computing," while it has very nearly achieved meaningless buzzword status, is an attempt by the business and marketing types to get their heads around what is a very real evolutionary transformation occurring in IT. The drivers are the drying up of CapEx budgets, the need to reduce service delivery time, and the requirement to purchase and pay for only what an organization needs to fulfill their business requirements.
Capital expenditures are coming under increased scrutiny, and are under constant budgetary pressure. "Cloud" based, on demand services allow IT service procurers to shift from a CapEx based model of owning the infrastructure to an OpEx model. Operational expenditures are typically larger chunks of budget than capital purchases, and moving IT services there can allow them to get "lost in the noise". Less red tape, less stringent approval processes, etc.
Time to deliver service is a labor cost, and if a procurer can shift that operational expense from internal overhead required to deploy an IT architecture to acquiring those same services from a cloud provider, it's perceived as a big win. The provider gets to deal with the headaches of capacity management, infrastructure design and integration, and delivering IT resources. The purchaser gets the luxury of simply specifying how much they want, for how long, and letting the provider leverage its economies of scale and automated processes to deliver the resources within the terms of the provider's SLA. The tradeoff is that the consumer of cloud services loses the ability to specify the platform and all its parameters in exchange for rapid delivery of a standardized service.
IT organizations are also under increased pressure to abandon the concept of designing and purchasing for peak capacity. Cloud providers are specifically addressing these needs by allowing their customers to pay only for what they use, not the spare capacity. Since the "cloud" capacity is shared, reused, and managed by the provider, the customer is afforded the ability to scale their environment dynamically to meet the needs of the business and its budget.
Now, how this ties into Web Services is important. Web Services, for a long time, was a solution in search of a well-defined problem. Now, with the "cloud" becoming a workable construct, Web Services come to the forefront as the way that stateless platforms can interact without intimate knowledge of the underlying infrastructure. Web Services will become more and more important as IT services are increasingly abstracted away from the hardware and OS platform. As I've worked for the past two years as a design architect for an infrastructure-as-a-service type platform, I can say with some authority that they're are an integral part of how we're going to need to deal with virtualized environments and stateless service contexts as they become pervasive elements of IT solutions.
hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ignorant to think that the future will all run on VMs, clouds, moonbeams and sunshine. All of that has to run on physical equipment somewhere. There is no such thing as something that exists 100% in the ether. It has to reside somewhere. These are physical ones and zeros we're talking about here.
With it residing somewhere, there has to be someone to design, build and maintain that equipment.
Also when companies see how big of a dip the performance of their critical apps take when they migrate to VMS, I can see a shift back to the racks and racks of servers.
Another Infoworld Fail.
Yours Truely,
Devil's Advocate
Re:So, the replaceables are still replaceable (Score:1, Insightful)
Or the converse:
Even if you like working for the company, it might not be around in six months.
Re:Blue collar??? (Score:1, Insightful)
This is some one trying to define a new normal. There is probably a name for this technique. It means there is a think tank behind this shill.
Face it. The world is not ready for computer geeks. Geeks had a brief high point when the film 'Hackers' came out, but this was to show the normal people that using a computer was cool and OK, ie: to move product, PC's, cell phones, games and now smart phones.
Management wants IT to be blue collar. IT is not blue collar. IT will consume the rest of the back office and most of management. Business is being outsourced to IT companies not the other way around. IT gets more and more stuff heaped on it every day. Phones, routers, security. These are not strictly IT areas, but IT does them. IT is the department with brains, and more importantly, the department that solves problems. Difficult, technical problems.
Management wants IT to cheap and fungible. It is not cheap, never can be, and not that easy to fung'
Management wants 'resources' and not people.
Management places no value on the institutional knowledge inside people's head.
Management cannot pickup software and hold it, but software can be shiny.
Management has no idea how computers work, they just want them to work.
Managment shoots the geek messenger, not the product salesman who promised the sun and the moon and the silver bullet, with gravy.
We are ahead of our time. The world is not ready for geeks, or brains or logic or rational thought or abstract thought.
Re:SOX HIPPA etc (Score:4, Insightful)
selling to the upper management above IT
Yes, see, they've been following the trend 'away from technology to the business end'.
It rather illustrates the whole problem with that idea; there are a lot of IT people who understand enough of the business end to work out solutions to business problems, but few business people who understand enough technology to even know what their options are. Instead they find themselves listening to salesreps and getting sold on very expensive rectal probes, despite the lack any urgent business need for mass colonic inspection.
"Wait, didn't we have virtualization before?"
Sort of like when CIOs went 'now we've implemented virtualization!' in 2007, when in fact they'd been running it since 2001 or earlier.
I have little doubt that most IT people who've been in the business for at least a decade and managed to stay relevant have more than enough ability to adapt to most changes; the Forrester analysts comment: "Somebody who is smart at CRM is not easily retrained on datacenter automation," would reflect more on himself than on most IT professionals; if your employees can't be retrained from CRM to datacenter automation I'd seriously question their ability with CRM solutions in the first place. (Hmm, although, having seen a few CRM solutions, that would explain some things).
Re:Infoworld Idiocy (Score:3, Insightful)
It's one of the rags that CIOs like to have up front to show they are "in touch".
I thought it was because it was free and it feels like a waste just to throw it away.
Re:Slow Progression (Score:4, Insightful)
Most businesses will be very very adverse to giving up control of their data, and somehow I don't see that ever changing, even when they claim the risk is almost 0%.
I really don't think you understand the average mindset of a PHB or MBA.
Most of them don't understand the concept or care enough to learn about it as long as they get their bonus.
These are the same people who outsourced positions that would be reviewing critical and confidential data overseas and these are the same people who are going to jump ship with a golden parachute when the ship sinks.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but most businesses will happily give up their data even though their IT dept is screaming bloody murder because its cheaper for them to do so or that the vendor salesperson bought them the best lunch.
Re:So, the replaceables are still replaceable (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, that's the only reason I work. I win the powerball tomorrow....never work again.
Re:Infoworld Idiocy (Score:1, Insightful)
Once again, another iteration of the cycle of "hiring an outside company to do (part of) your IT work". We've been here many times before.
Sometimes it makes sense. And sometimes it doesn't. Since management goes in fads, some companies will do it where it doesn't make sense, get burned, and back out. The fad will fade. And then another fad will come along.
I understand that management really would like to be able to treat IT like an utility, like air conditioning or plumbing. But consider the responsiveness of the outfits that are specialists in AC or plumbing. When you can afford to have IT down for as long as it takes a plumber or AC tech to be scheduled and arrive, and when your IT doesn't change any more often than you have your AC system adjusted, then that will be possible. Until then, every company above a certain size will need their own, in-house, IT staff.
Re:So, the replaceables are still replaceable (Score:3, Insightful)
Cloud Computing Concidered Harmful (Score:4, Insightful)
Things change.
Undeniably.
Computing will become more utility like. Adapt or die.
Oh, I hope not. That would be terrible. That would be vendor lock-in of the very worst kind. Assuming all vendors agreed on a standard (not foreseeable), none of them would follow it precisely (think HTML/Javascript/CSS). Large vendors would start creating artificial barriers-to-entry. Regulation would crop up to "protect the consumer" -- failing entirely to protect anyone, the bureaucracy would also serve as barrier-to-entry. The big players would have no intensive to do a great job, only a mediocre one.
Things can only get uglier from there. Imagine if certain DNS registrars [slashdot.org] were offering cloud services. You'd find migrating your data and programs to be terribly difficult. Despite being highly illegal, you could never tell if your programs or data had been leaked for profit. Costs may seem reasonable for a while. Once the above barriers-to-entry start coming up, prices will rise (because they can). We'd never be able to dethrone Intuit (Quickbooks) once people's data live solely on their servers (The data you need to keep for 5+ years in case of an IRS audit). I could go on.
Privacy and reliability are both issues for home and business users. If either the service OR the ISP goes down, you're stuck.
Offsite computing resources make sense for small business web service and backup. They only make a little sense for mid size businesses. They make no sense for large businesses.
(And I recommend in-house backup even if it does make sense otherwise.)
Don't tell me that it's the way of the future. If cloud computing strikes, you'll be telling me that life stinks, deal with it. You might not see that yet. Hopefully, you won't need to.