Cloud computing: What does it really mean for IT jobs?

By AK Udofeh



As adoption of cloud computing services takes off, critics
argue that demand for certain IT jobs will all disappear.

They recall that just as manual
labourers were replaced by the machines of industry in the 19th century so certain
IT roles will be swept away by cloud computing.

That’s the argument put forward by
Gartner research director Gregor Petri - who believes that many roles managing
IT infrastructure will all but disappear.

Manual management of IT
infrastructure - for instance provisioning additional storage, servers or
network capacity for a particular application - will increasingly be automated
as software layers in the cloud automatically divert IT resources to where they
are needed, he said.

“It is very much like
industrialisation,” he said.

“Take the very old example given by
Adam Smith of the pin makers who used to take a day to make four pins, then a
factory is built that can make 10,000 pins in an hour.

“That is what cloud computing is
making possible: you can carry out these computing tasks on an industrial
scale.”

Petri said that just as people no
longer make pins manually, so in general people won’t perform tasks like
monitoring an app’s storage demands and purchasing and installing new storage
for it.

“The cloud computing app is already
programmed in a way that allows the application to access additional storage
when it is needed, as a result nobody is needed to do that
anymore,”  he said.

“Cloud is allowing the industrialisation
of IT, that is why to some people it is very scary.”

While Petri believes that
traditional infrastructure management roles will become all but defunct,
allowing IT systems to be run with fewer people, he said it doesn’t necessarily
mean the individuals who carried out those roles will find themselves out of
the job.

Instead he sees new roles being
created that use that individuals’ technical skills to add value to the
business, for instance working with managers in other departments to make company
IT systems better fit the needs of staff or customers. “People in those roles
need to be flexible in the idea of what their role is,” he said.

The changing landscape of computing
- for instance real-time big data analytics or the provision of scalable cloud
services to always connected mobile computers - will also create new roles, he
said.

When
will it happen?

While today’s cloud platforms are
already automatically provision these resources today, Petri said that the
effect of this industrialisation of computing will not be felt until more
applications are shifted to the cloud.

That could be some time off.
Although adoption of cloud services is growing rapidly - Gartner predicts that
the market for cloud computer services will grow 48.7 per cent in 2012 to $5bn,
up from $3.4 billion in 2011 - spend on cloud services is still only a fraction of global IT
spend. However, by 2020 the majority of organisations will rely on
the cloud for more than half of their IT services, according to
Gartner’s 2011 CIO Agenda Survey.

Will
jobs really disappear?

Not everyone is convinced that cloud
computing will have such a profound effect on the IT jobs landscape.

Some believe that while roles will
likely transition from in-house IT teams to cloud providers as companies
consume more cloud services, the roles and demand for skills will remain.

As a TechRepublic reader who works
for a large cloud provider pointed out: “I still deal with the daily hands on
from thousands of customers / clients, some pretty huge ones at that. Between
dealing with their AD, LDAP, Windows / Linux deployments, configuration and
code issues, I can say that server administrators will still be needed in fact
more than ever.”

Other readers have pointed out that
IT roles tend to endure far longer than expected and certain technical skills
remain in demand. Old programming languages never die, as another reader points
out:”Back in 1977 I attended a COBOL Summer class in my university. The first
thing the instructor told us was that it was dead language, as new technologies
were pushing it to extinction… Guess what, early this morning I reviewed (part
of my duties as a DBA) some SQL embedded in a COBOL program to run in the z196
Mainframe”.

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