(Critical editing by Abhishek Kapoor)
Nowadays you must have heard about the cloud computing technology that many IT companies have adopted. WATBlog has reported regularly about the whereabouts of Cloud Computing. No doubt its an innovative concept but somewhere it is threatening IT jobs. IDC has predicted that by 2012, investment on cloud service will increase to $42 billion. Analyst firm indicated that as time will pass cloud computing will become more and more prevalent it will replace the jobs performed by IT professionals.
There’s nothing to worry, this won’t happen at least for the next few months. As of now SaaS is in and cloud computing is the next level but not its replacement. It is more likely to take five years for any company to switch over. Initially, cloud computing will create new jobs for monitoring infrastructure performance, datacenter operations, shifting to cloud service provider like Google, Amazon etc. According to Mark McDonald, Vice President of Gartner’s group, there will not be much growth in these infrastructure jobs at cloud providers end, due to the economies of scale that came from massive, highly automated and virtualized service-based infrastructures. Few people are required for per thousand transactions.
Anyhow, if you grab that job, you have to follow the skill set which is more of managerial and administrative and less technical, meetings and conferences as major work will be performed at service provider front. Even if you are able to get a job with a service provider this may not be your greatest achievement. Cloud providers would prefer their offices to be in places where electricity is affordable and comparatively cheaper.
This is basically the shift from blue-collar to white-collar IT professionals. Configurations and maintainance of infrastructure jobs will face a major risk as outsourcing the functionality would just ignore administration. So, lesser jobs will emerge for server administrators, database administrators and infrastructure as network staff and companies don’t need to carry their extra burden. Some of these people can be retained by companies but will be given the role of datacenter automation or some monitoring work instead of CRM.
After this, companies will look more for tech savvy people who can manage the co-ordination and relationship with industrial-strength cloud players. IT people with experience in Web scale-out deployments will be more in demand for managing, and optimizing these applications.
CIOs will also face the shift from supplier to management, their major role will be negotiating contracts and management with a focus on business process instead of CPUs, disk space, and cooling systems. And the in-house software developers’ job will be more of SaaS integration with SaaS.
Its reasonable to assume that less professional will be required to manage it but it will take a decade to make it practical. I could be wrong but cloud based computing will soon be available as free IT pros and SQL server DBAs so that they can easily perform value-added functions. I can’t say its good or bad but surely it will be interesting to analyze its impact on a complete makeover of corporate IT.
