Is there a future in IT?

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RVQ

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As per the Cloud and Hosting Conference

It seems like over the past year or so Microsoft has been on a huge drive to get companies to move their Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint to Office 365. Those sales pitches also has the big boys thinking about moving other services into Azure...

I'm involved in cloud projects for a large enterprise and looking at the long term roadmaps I can't help but wonder what the future holds for anyone starting a career in IT today. I can see that at least 50% of my teams current role will be moved to a cloud provider within the next 5 years or so.

With the outsource movement the service providers usually took over most of the staff from the client but the cloud movement seems to be a whole other ballgame. With SDN/NFV these cloud datacenters only have a handful of permanent staff and every month or so a 'box drop team' is sent with 'dumb' hardware to add or swap out old/broken hardware. Everything is driven by highly skilled expert engineers from very few operations centers globally.

Is cloud computing the beginning of the end for the average IT Techie?
 
It depends on the type of techies - that guy that goes into the DC to do tape backups? Jup. The guy that builds physical servers and goes downstairs to rack them? Jup. In general, there will be fewer instances where dealing with physical hardware is necessary so there will be fewer people doing it.

However, the kind of techies who design and set up server and network infrastructure are here to stay. As much as I can log onto Azure/Amazon and buy some server time with my credit card, this infrastructure needs to be integrated into the enterprise, secured, patched, etc.

There will be ones left behind and the ones who will get ahead are the people who realize it's all the some thing just done differently.
 
I just can't believe how willing companies are to put all their corporate intellectual property into someone else's computer.
 
How many companies run their IT with perm staff? A large base of IT work is done by contractors. How many companies outsource infrastructure management, software dev, testing, etc? How easily does analysis containing business strategy get handed over to a vendor? Many companies simple hand over their IP and operations to outsiders.

These "flexiworkers" and vendors are often based outside of SA jurisdiction. The only thing that protects you is an NDA.

How is cloud computing more shocking than this?
 
Turbo_Aspiration said:
How many companies run their IT with perm staff? A large base of IT work is done by contractors. How many companies outsource infrastructure management, software dev, testing, etc? How easily does analysis containing business strategy get handed over to a vendor? Many companies simple hand over their IP and operations to outsiders.

These "flexiworkers" and vendors are often based outside of SA jurisdiction. The only thing that protects you is an NDA.

How is cloud computing more shocking than this?
Click to expand...
Agreed, just as bad
 
Sinbad said:
Agreed, just as bad
Click to expand...

Daily... China tries to hack Google and get into their stuff to expose discidents. I would argue that cloud data is more secure and safe than data held normally by 99.9999% of companies .
 
Turbo_Aspiration said:
It depends on the type of techies - that guy that goes into the DC to do tape backups? Jup. The guy that builds physical servers and goes downstairs to rack them? Jup. In general, there will be fewer instances where dealing with physical hardware is necessary so there will be fewer people doing it.

However, the kind of techies who design and set up server and network infrastructure are here to stay. As much as I can log onto Azure/Amazon and buy some server time with my credit card, this infrastructure needs to be integrated into the enterprise, secured, patched, etc.

There will be ones left behind and the ones who will get ahead are the people who realize it's all the some thing just done differently.
Click to expand...

IaaS, you will still need someone to architect, install and maintain the OS, Applications, Networking and Security side but the number of people required is a fraction that's currently required to maintain your own enterprises DC. The expensive Specialist Cisco, EMC, Infrastructure... Techies have no place in this world especially where more general knowledge of the Technology is required and not the Vendor... My guess is the current Virtualization and Security guys survive in this new world... The Mainframe Guys should probably open a pub and drink to their glory days...

PaaS, gets rid of the rest of the guys and probably only needs a few senior generalist techies and devs to develop solutions based on a catalog of services provided by the cloud.

SaaS, really is the final nail as you probably only need a few mid-level techies and no devs to make use of "complete package" solutions

This may seem extreme but the more I deal with these cloud projects the more I wonder about the future of the kids wanting or starting to join the IT Industry in Africa today...


Sinbad said:
I just can't believe how willing companies are to put all their corporate intellectual property into someone else's computer.
Click to expand...

It's no better than hosting, outsourcing or assuming that internal staff aren't stealing from you, at least these cloud infrastructures comply to the many regulations out there something that I'm sure almost every Enterprise in Africa cant claim...
 
Turbo_Aspiration said:
How many companies run their IT with perm staff? A large base of IT work is done by contractors. How many companies outsource infrastructure management, software dev, testing, etc? How easily does analysis containing business strategy get handed over to a vendor? Many companies simple hand over their IP and operations to outsiders.

These "flexiworkers" and vendors are often based outside of SA jurisdiction. The only thing that protects you is an NDA.

How is cloud computing more shocking than this?
Click to expand...

The Outsourcing Model brought all the 'Skilled' IT Guys into companies that specialized in IT Services allowing them to offer their skills to multiple clients, in a time when the industry had just gotten off the ground, the hot PA had no idea what an IP Address was and being a Geek was still uncool.

The Cloud Model seems to make all these guys jobs redundant as the Vendor has just cut out the Distributor, Reseller and Services Company out of the Model and is now selling direct to the End-User. All they need to do is add Managed Services to IaaS and Dev Services to PaaS and any techie that's not working for MS, Amazon, Google, HP... will just be running around setting up high speed, resilient links to the cloud datacenters...

Fortunately for me my CV doesn't say MCITP, Cisco, Fortinet, EMC, Red Hat, Windows, Exchange... Administrator but I'm now also wondering about all the IT Techies that spent years positioning themselves behind a Vendor (not the technology as a whole) with the expectation that it will take them to retirement...
 
ghoti said:
Life in IT sucks so much, Im glad I am out.
Click to expand...

Like anything in life it has it's downsides; The War Rooms, Hardware/Software Problems beyond your control, End-users, Having to stand in front of EXCO and let them take a bite out of you...

But after 15 years even though I complain every now and then, I still do enjoy this game...

I dread the day they vaporise my job and put in the clouds...
 
IT is changing its not going away, just keep yourself relevant and you will be ok. I'm actually glad Hardware is going away for most companies. The focus going forward I suspect will be more to translate business requirements into technical specifications, much more exciting then worrying about a server hardware failing or trying to keep an Exchange server patched.
 
Part of the reason hardware is going is that the cost model doesn't suit the way businesses are run these days.

Businesses have evolved a lot over the last 2 decades from being capital intensive to a basic cost/month which is scalable and predictable vs usage/profit. This actually suites the SME market growth in SA which we seem to not have as much of as we should and startups in particular as the burn rate is definable with no massive capital input costs.

If u ask me, the market in SA has never been as disruptable as it is now and large corporates who have not kept up with this transition, likely the ones forking out for these hardware specialists where they need not(not always the case imo, regulations force IT hardware in some cases), may not be around in the next decade
 
If you're concerned about this - work for a company that deals with highly confidential stuff...no chance in hell that stuff is going into a cloud or outsourced.

My employer has nothing in the cloud as far as I can tell. Hell they don't even trust dedicated servers in data centres...they'll rather spend a fortune putting in generators, redundant fibre & failover sites on own premises.

Turbo_Aspiration said:
How many companies run their IT with perm staff?
Click to expand...
Same for this. No outsiders touch any IT whatsoever.

So yeah if you want job security thats a good bet. High pressure though...eish internet is down doesn't cut it in that environment.
 
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