How Increasing Cloud Reliance Affects IT Jobs 194
snydeq writes "Kevin Fogarty takes a look at how the rise of cloud computing will impact IT jobs, outlining which roles stand to gain prominence in the years to come, and which roles will suffer as organizations extend their commitments to the cloud. 'Ultimately the bulk of IT could look more like a projects office than the way it looks now, when most of the hands-on work is done inside. It probably won't be a total transformation, but moving into cloud, there will be more of that and less DIY.'"
And when the cloud goes down. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your business is dead in the water.
If that only happens 2 days a year, you just factor that as a cost unless there is some critical reason you must remain up (hospital).
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
As jobs get completely slaughtered something has to give. Shorter work weeks or civil unrest.
Blame IT for this. (Score:1, Insightful)
The Cloud offers a lot of advantages over conventional IT:
o Scalability when you want it.
o No need to deal with the payroll of admins.
o Guaranteed service levels.
o Actual security. There has yet to be a breach with a cloud provider. Plus, this is what SLAs are for.
o Money savings by not having to have a server room, with the attendant HVAC, power, and security requirements.
o Not handcuffed to OS, application, and database versions.
o No need to concern about if running the latest Exchange versions.
o No need to deal with backups and the attendant infrastructure.
For a midsized company, one would be a fool not to go with cloud based services. Cloud security has shown itself to be excellent. The only people who complain about the cloud are those with a vested interest in the old style of running things. Kick the old server guys to the curb -- technology moves on, and businesses don't need to have server rooms anymore, just like businesses don't need TTYs and printers attached to terminals. Businesses don't even need to care what a server looks like. The cloud provider which has advantages of economies of scale can deal with that.
Who do you trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the "cloud" is that you put your complete trust in
a. the cloud provider
b. the telco that connects you to the cloud
As anyone who has ever had to deal with outside vendors knows, they have no real commitment to your business. You are a single account.
When your business cannot connect to the systems, it is a crisis for your business.
For them, it is another day in the office.
Re:Good thing the cloud got delayed today (Score:5, Insightful)
My org is fairly pro SaaS but we just got hit by a half day outage with Salesforce on the golive day for a new solution that of course uses Salesforce as the user interface. That was egg on our face that we couldn't fix and which made quite a few people sit up and take notice. I'm not sure that it's a death nail for new projects being based around cloud/SaaS here but significantly more downtime and it's going to be a serious risk flagged by project sponsors and auditors.
Re:And when the cloud goes down. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
Right now, the differentiator between you and me should not be how we store our data. Whether my data resides on a server in my office or in a databank with some outfit I can only access through my ISP, what decides it for our potential clients should be the quality of service we offer respectively, or even the types of service we offer.
Re:Who do you trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. These days, people at home, let alone businesses, are operating at least two active connections to the internet (cable/DSL and cellular). The internet was designed right from the start to support multiple connections so that a link can fail without anyone noticing. It seems strange to me that network outages are still a topic of debate.
It's about the points of failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
When the systems were in your office, you had X number of points of failure.
And you had someone on site who's job it was to make sure that those systems were available to you.
So you're moving to the "cloud" to save money ... by increasing the number of the points of failure.
So then you add additional systems to mitigate the problems that come with the "cloud". And you probably outsource the maintenance of those systems as well.
And everything is fine until there is a problem. At which point you realize that all the people who you depend upon to keep your systems working only see you as another account. If your business fails, then they're out a portion of their income (until they replace the account with another one).
Re:Blame IT for this. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll bite.
Scalability: Depends. Some things may scale like putting files for download with Akamai. Other things, not so much. The cloud is a tool in the architect's toolbox.
Admin payroll: Someone is going to need to architect things, so you will still have an IT department, if only to maintain your internal network links, and make sure the desktop PCs don't become botnet clients. Don't forget networking. You will need to have those fat pipes to access the cloud provider, so you will still need a space for those Cisco Nexus 7000 boxes with the clear covers.
Guarenteed SLAs: Read the contract... the SLA may not be as good as people think it might be.
Oh, and if the cloud provider goes bankrupt, the data on their servers is free for the taking by anyone who so desires. Even though it is SOP for auctions to wipe the drives, this gets forgotten or "forgotten". Promises mean nothing when some competitor in Elbonia now has your payroll (sold your employees' info to ID thieves), your client list (and is offering the same services for 50% less), your source code (with a version of your product that is exactly the same except in name), your suppliers (which are then harassed to make better deals elsewhere), and others.
No recorded breach with a cloud provider... time will tell on this one. Nothing is 100% secure. Gmail has had people report incidents, Dropbox has had the security tokens that people talked about, and so on.
No server room? I'm sorry, but even with "economies of scale", you are either paying for a data center in house, or you will be paying for one somewhere else. Don't forget regulations about physical security of data.
DB/OS versions? Sure. However, if something breaks your app's code due to an update done without notice, there is no way to roll back. ITIL 101 here.
Exchange versions? See above.
Don't assume the cloud provider has backups automatically. If someone logs on as an admin with a cloud provider and blows all your storage away, it may not be recoverable, while the old LTO-5 tape library will be able to restore data. When push comes to shove, and in some industries, you better retain data for a while (up to 50 years if dealing with the FAA), you need to pack your own parachute. I trust tape, and moving archived data to the latest archival version every couple years far more than a cloud provider's promise. However, I'm one of those "IT guys" that the parent apparently dislike, so if someone wants to be fast and loose with their data, they can store it on the cloud and assume that their storage has all the snapshot features of the EMC SAN they want to chuck.
Cloud computing is a useful tool. It won't replace server rooms anytime soon. Maybe I'm a fossil, but I rather trust a VTL, replicated SAN, or even good old fashioned tape far more than I would trust just an assurance that a cloud provider has my data backed up.
Re:Not what I signed up for (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry, in a few years a new company will come along, with a great new product that will allow you to cheaply pull the information back into your organisation, handing power back to users, distributing access and design.
This will then be followed by a period of great excitement, with some people making themselves rich, but then that company will become large and bloated, creating more and more bloated systems, and then we'll be sending our information back out to a "central" system.