Cloud computing will devalue the role of IT professionals

Exploding this and other myths

You’ve heard the rhetoric: Cloud computing changes everything. The days of the enterprise data centre and the small business computer room are numbered. At some point in the not too distant future, you’ll be switching off the last server, turning out the lights, and looking for a career change. No need for IT professionals any more when cloud providers are taking care of everything the business needs.

The sad thing is that some people really believe all this. And it’s a great story to write about if you are a journalist too. Disruption of the status quo, with traditional infrastructure and software vendors being usurped by the likes of Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, and some juicy scaremongering about whether your job will be safe in the future.

So what’s the reality?

Well there are two main things going on under the cloud computing banner. The first is the continued evolution of technology to enable more efficient and flexible infrastructure to be built, largely based on the concepts of virtualisation and resource pooling. These approaches can be used in house to create a more dynamic IT environment that, over time, can reduce costs, boost the responsiveness to new and changing requirements, and, as importantly, make the life of IT professionals easier in many respects.

These same developments allow service providers to pretty much do the same in their data centres – i.e. reduce costs and increase flexibility. This in turn changes some of the economics and practicalities of hosting, which potentially shifts the line in terms of what it’s feasible, desirable and sensible to outsource from an enterprise IT perspective. With the trends we are seeing, despite the prejudices and genuine risks associated with the hosted service model, it would seem reasonable to assume an increase in the uptake of hosted services as time goes on.

The point is, though, that a lot of what runs across your existing IT landscape today is actually very predictable and probably doesn’t need the extreme flexibility touted by cloud technology and service vendors. Traditional infrastructure and hosting models will therefore co-exist with dynamic ‘private clouds’ and ‘on demand’ or ‘elastic’ cloud services for the foreseeable future.

Contrary to the aforementioned rhetoric, this means that the role of the IT professional will become even more important. When things are working across computing models and domains, often crossing the in-house/service provider boundary, you’re going to need more skill and experience to make sure it all hangs together, not less.

This is something we explore in our latest paper entitled ‘Applied Cloud Computing’
, and in this we talk about managing the additional complexity and risk that is inevitable as organisations take advantage of cloud related developments. The need for more robustly defined architectural standards, security policy and operational process that can cope with cross-domain integration and dependencies means that far from de-skilling, some IT departments will have to up their game.

If you have any views on this yourself, drop me a line. Meanwhile, if you are interested in reading more, the abovementioned paper can be downloaded from here.

Dale Vile

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Dale is a co-founder of Freeform Dynamics, and today runs the company. As part of this, he oversees the organisation’s industry coverage and research agenda, which tracks technology trends and developments, along with IT-related buying behaviour among mainstream enterprises, SMBs and public sector organisations.