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Comments: 157 +- IT: Cloud-Sourcing's Long-Term Impact On IT Careers on Thursday July 23 2009, @09:15AM
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samzenpus
on Thursday July 23 2009, @09:15AM
from the keeping-your-job-in-the-clouds dept.
from the keeping-your-job-in-the-clouds dept.
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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."
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So, the replaceables are still replaceable (Score:4, Insightful)
and for the rest of us; business as normal. Got it.
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.
Parent
When the great robot revolt comes (Score:5, Funny)
The humans were lined up
"What do you do?"
"Im a cloud..." *zap* he falls dead from a robot laser
"What do you do?"
"Im a web..." *zap* he falls dead from a robot laser
"What do you do?"
"Im the chief inform...." *zap* he falls dead
"What do you do?"
"Im the tech who fixes your laser, I see you're busy downsizing the IT department... I'm taking an early lunch, k? Save me the copy girl, she's kind of hot"
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, because we all know everybody has a cow in their back yard and a generator in their basement.
I have a generator in my basement (well, my garage, anyhow). And my next-door neighbor is kind of a cow...
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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We're all irreplaceable until that time when someone devises a machine/process/alternative
Or shell script...
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Don't overestimate your ability in avoiding being replaced. Everyone is replaceable or at least expendable.
I'm thinking of Terrel Owens (TO), who is (was??) extremely talented and gifted receiver in the NFL, became such a liability that not even his talent could keep him on a team. He now has a New Nickname ... "Team Obliterator".
Not to mention this economy which sucks raw eggs, even if a company likes you, you may not have a job in six months.
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Want to work with or develop the latest tech, coolest languages, ingenious scalable configurations?
Otherwise, as the OP mentioned, it's business as usual, suck it up.
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After all, that's the only reason I work. I win the powerball tomorrow....never work again.
SOX HIPPA etc (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Parent
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Bingo, I'm tired of this shit, and I'm not even old. You can thank MS for whispering "cloud computing" in the backroom to people at every conference for the past year. My S.O. and others in IT/enterprise have been whining that cloud computing has been a term selling to the upper management above IT who have no idea what it means. I have no idea how they managed to infiltrate that crowd.
I give it about another year or two before people go "Wait, didn't we have virtualization before?". Or "wait, why does MS w
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MS really didn't come up with Cloud Computing. They have jumped on the bandwagon with their Azure platform but they are not the ones who really pushed it. Google and Amazon are more to blame for this.
Microsoft is more pushing their Hyper-V Virtualization platform. I think they just do cloud computing enough to be like, yes we have a cloud. To me, future of cloud computing is more companies having clusters of servers where you can create additional instances and easily add more hardware. This is more what Mi
Re:SOX HIPPA etc (Score:4, Interesting)
I went to an HP tech conference a month ago and everything was cloud this and cloud that and it was rather irritating for those of us that understand it's just a clustered OS in a virtual environment. With Cisco and HP creating switches that integrate with XenServer, HyperV, and of course VMWare it's just further abstraction of more and more components of the network. Of course you still need all the same hardware you used before as well as all the same software. You just need more software and more hardware to create what people expect from a "cloud."
What got worse, the IT Director, my immediate boss is all about clouds to the owner and I had to speak up saying that we already have a XenServer based cloud, why would we need to waste even more money on outsourcing something that has had lots of issues with reliability, security, and of course requires all new programming. The owner has a problem with outsourcing thankfully as he has been burned by it on more than one occasion. Of course the real issue with outsourcing is that you still need people around that are directly employed to manage the projects you're outsourcing. This means people like me will be around for quite some time to come.
Parent
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).
Parent
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Re:SOX HIPPA etc (Score:4, Funny)
Look for these want ads from the clueless recruiters:
Wanted: Cloud Computing Expert.
Must have 5 years in depth experience in Cloud Computing internals.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever happened to SaaS? Oh, still not really here is it?
a) What do you think "cloud computing" is, exactly? That's right... SaaS.
b) What do you think gmail and the rest of the Google app suite is?
No, SaaS, as a concept, is alive and well. Will it grow and turn into an actual money-making endeavour? That I don't know.
Or "Web Services?" In the end, its just another way to move data around... nothing really revolunatary.
Funny, given there's web services *everywhere*. Amazon exposes their API through a
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.
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for me to poop on!
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Truth is, SaaS is evolutionary, not revolutionary. That's been true for everything in the past 20 years of computing.
Yes and no. Evolutionary doesn't mean that you never get sudden shocking change. You can get get long slow changes that suddenly lead to a catastrophic change (in a mathematical sense) to a new stable state. I don't claim to be wise enough to say that SaaS is such a tipping point though. Maybe it's just same-old-same-old. Maybe it's even a response to a tipping point, and we didn't notice the world crashing around our ears...
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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.
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We''ll get there when we get there. (Score:2)
The reality check implies practical experience. The more the better. Things don't always work out the way you expect.
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%.
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What the Industry sometimes fails to realize is that it is IT people who make or break the products.
[...]
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%.
Don't forget to factor in the "costs" (in a broad sense) of doing stuff the old way too. While putting stuff out there definitely does carry a risk, so does keeping it in-house where it is subject to a lot of bumbling incompetence. Let's be honest. Not all IT staff are amazing superheroes who instantly enable their users to do anything they want while simultaneously upholding all corporate policies.
(FYI, a number of big businesses are looking hard at running internal clouds, which muddies the picture a lot.
Re:Slow Progression (Score:4, Interesting)
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%.
When the cloud utility is Google, IBM, Amazon or some other mega corporation there is no way in hell that the security or reliability will be any worse than what a small company can muster on their own. The writing's been on the wall for a long time now, but many techies that love dealing with server infrastructure doesn't want to give up control of what they have, or aren't able to admit that someone else can do their job better. It is the same thinking which is why some people still insist on building their own servers by assembling the hardware components themselves and running Gentoo instead of buying something pre-packaged. Economies of scale doesn't work out very well for those.
Parent
Re:Slow Progression (Score:4, Interesting)
I would beg to differ. Most don't see the NEED for virtualization, but I can assure you that it is very much a hidden asset (need) that is not being fulfilled.
Most people see technology as "we'll fix it when it breaks". And they have no idea how much their lives and businesses depend on it, until it disappears.
Long term replacement plans are never employed, and businesses end up being held hostage by disaster.
I know of plenty of small businesses who have gone out of business because their ONE server has died, and they can't recover the data. Their one server died, because it was ten to twelve years old, and they never thought to do backups, or replace it, or whatever because they don't have a full time IT staff dedicated to supporting it to explain why they need to worry about such things.
Virtualization is just another means of removing Hardware dependencies from the equation. That Abstraction layer is such that you can migrate the server to new hardware faster and easier than trying to migrate it. I can do a whole new hardware platform migration in a few minutes with VMWare. Shut the old machine down, move the VM to the new box, fire it up.
And when you add in features like snapshots it just rocks. I can't tell you how much snapshots are worth. I've even used VM snapshot in a criminal investigation, where we could show exactly when the fraud was started.
It saves them money, and headaches, and eventually it will save their business.
Parent
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.
Parent
The Sysadmin is dead! Long live the Sysadmin! (Score:5, Interesting)
And I say that as a sysadmin myself.
There are thousands of businesses around the world that are just large enough to need a couple of full-time IT people of some description. These businesses account for a lot of IT jobs. If you actually crunch the numbers, the huge companies of this world don't employ that many people as a percentage of the working population.
SaaS allows a business to grow much larger before it needs a full-time IT presence than was previously possible - all those crappy little applications (of which there are thousands) that IT technicians, sysadmins etc. got to know backwards and inside out and were next to useless in their next job are going the way of the dodo. PC so full of viruses and spyware it's virtually unusable? Considering the amount of money you'll pay per month for a full-time member of staff, it may well be cheaper to keep a couple of spares in the cupboard and just bin it when you hit trouble.
This is great for the business - they can get more done for less money. Not so much for the sysadmin.
Blue White Blue (Score:2)
Blue collar??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone, anywhere, ever, has considered an IT worker 'blue collar'.
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An 8U server once fell and hit me in the head on another occasion.
My primary datacenter chiller caught fire while I was literally sitting next to it working on a piece of equipment. BTW, Halon works.
The coup de grace of danger was when a leaking overhead pipe was cascading water over a 400 amp three phase power main cabinet. I had to go in and pull the disconnect lever.
Danger finds a way.
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).
Parent
Possible problems with adopting SaaS? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Flexibility: difficult to mold SaaS solution to your specific business operations.
2) Reliability: requiring a connection to the internet adds an additional point of failure.
3) Speed: easy to get 40mbps internally. Internet connect is more likely to be 1.5mbps split 50 ways.
4) Cost: from what I have seen, SaaS is not especially cheap.
5) Security: debatable.
6) Vendor-lockin: if you need something changed on the server side, you only have one choice for the developers.
I don't really know, and I suppose a lot of it is situational, but I am not certain that that is going to take over the world any time soon.
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A lot depends on the kind of client that would go for SaaS.
Companies that depend on their IT to give them the edge over the competition? Probably not.
Companies that are sufficiently big & complicated that there will never be a "one-size fits all" solution that suits them? Probably not.
Companies that do something that is not directly related to IT and just see the computer as a sophisticated calculator/typewriter/balance sheet? Ah, now that's more likely.
And I'll tell you now that companies in the fin
And what, exactly, connects *TO* the cloud? (Score:4, Funny)
And how do you connect to it? I hate this idiotic world view that we all magically plug into the cloud and the data mystically appears in front of our eyeballs.
Last time I checked, the cloud holds the data... it doesn't get us to the cloud, nor does it process the data (well, in some cases, maybe).
They're all unknowingly implying that we're going to plug into some matrix style knowledge bank.
And if that really is the case, I guess my IT job will shift to cleaning those metal brain plugs.
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I heard the same reasoning when IT moved to networked drives and shared printers.
Not news - entreprise integration was always big (Score:2)
Software for consumers is mostly Consumer Products which is a part of the industry that doesn't employ that many IT professionals.
The vast majority (by far) of IT professionals works in IT Services and in-house software development units, both of which are pretty much all about custom enterprise applications development and integration.
The other bit of the industry left (IT Corporate Products) is again all about corporate applications development and integration (which while mostly product oriented still in
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.
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.
And where are the flying cars? (Score:2, Interesting)
There is more to SAAS and Cloud computing than the technical aspect. People, in general, are averse to change, and introducing another technology into the Peter Principle must be factored in as well. As our cultures become more complex and risk-averse, that is more enhanced, meaning that there has to be a very tangible REASON to change that is worth the upsetting of the status quo.
So for the short term, only early adopters are going to dip their toes in this water, by putting hot-swap sites on a cloud (th
called it ditributed computing in decades ago (Score:2)
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
Loss of competitive advantage (Score:3, Interesting)
What cloud computing will do is to erase the advantage that one company has over their competitors. Take a company who has a 'better' business process and has built their in-house IT systems around it. Now, have them move to a cloud solution. The first things that must go are their custom data models and algorithms. Companies re-engineer themselves to fit OTS applications much more often than they customize the apps to fit the business. The next thing to go wil be their in-house development staff. No sense in keeping them around when nothing is left to be written that is specific to their company. Next, the executives who have domain knowledge specific to that companies' core processes can go. Since everyone in the industry (or across many) use the same processes, why pay big salaries when the supply of suitable talent is much larger.
So tell me: Why should I do business with your company? What do you do that your competitors don't? I mean, the cheap ones, in India or China.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
Existing cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon EC2) let you run any software in the cloud. You are confusing "cloud computing" (which is, insofar as you are using someone else's cloud, hardware as a