Future of IT

The cloud, what does it mean for the future of IT? From previous posts you know that I feel strongly that this is a great direction to be moving in, but what does it really mean for tech jobs?

A recent article from ComputerWorld stated that by 2012, cloud services will rake in $42 billion – roughly 3x what it takes in currently. The article seems to be split, with a sense of change that will happen in the next decade or so involving the nuts and bolts IT guys. I have to agree, in that there will be less demand for many staples we see in medium size business today. Exchange, SharePoint, CRM Software, and Financial applications are all perfect candidates to be moved off site. With bandwidth getting cheaper by the day and energy costs rising, it really is only a matter of time before it is more cost efficient to keep these items off site, and have them managed for you on top of it. Email archiving, backups, and hardware upgrades will be taken off the systems admin plate. Scary thought considering how much of systems admin role entails exactly those tasks. But will they be put out of a job? I don’t see it quite that way.

This will be the biggest change in computing since the development of the internet. The previously mentioned article said the last change as e-commerce. However, the internet was the vehicle. I’m not sure the thing people will remember in the switch will be the cloud, but it certainly will be the vehicle. The jobs it will create, and it WILL create them, will be a different breed of IT. The roles will not be so much based on the technical roles that they are today, but on the ability to act with a business sense. A role typically taken up by CIO/CTO that will be shifted onto the support roles. Of course those higher level positions will still have the same responsibility, but may be able to really spend their time focusing on business processes as the support team can manage the cloud. Of course there is a great deal of technology involved still, and the hardware/software support roles will not go away. The other area that will flourish with this change will be security. Suddenly with everything offsite, security will be a very point that is highly scrutinized.

Cloud computing is definitely on the front line of change in IT, however is not nearly the answer for everything. It’s not right for everyone, and it’s not going to put you out of a job. At least not yet. We can revisit in 10 years. Not convinced? Check out the myths of cloud computing.