Cloud Computing and Technology: The Growing Cyber Workforce
November 23, 2011
The first waves of cloud computing have hit the shore and the impact has rattled many in IT. Vendor strategies and business plans are hastily being rewritten as a result of the change. But the implications of cloud computing appear far more reaching than just mid-course adjustments of corporate plans. IT workers are expected to be strongly impacted by the cloud.
James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said that initially cloud computing could create new jobs. The move to cloud applications may mean that there will be work in migrating data or integrating together new systems…
But longer term, the outlook is less rosy. Mark McDonald, Gartner vice president of executive programs, told ComputerWorld as early as 2009 that the efficiencies of cloud computing will ultimately result in being able to do more with fewer workers. Cloud computing is designed to operate on the level of economies of scale, taking advantage of massive, highly automated and virtualized self-service infrastructure. McDonald said that “there will likely be fewer people needed per thousand transactions.”
Carole Schlocker, president of IT staffing at iSpace, said that “if you’re able to get one of these jobs, in many cases it’s a skill set that is less technical and more managerial and administrative, with days full of conference calls and putting out fires. In such jobs, few technical skills are added to your repertoire.”
John McCarthy, vice president and principal analyst of IT research at Forrester, said that “with the IT expectation gap — technology use is growing, but IT budgets are flat — rising, businesses are looking at instant, pay-per-use, on-demand models. The cloud will impact IT service providers in a big way. It may not replace jobs, but cloud computing with its ease of set-up and cost benefits, could become the politically correct alternative to offshoring.”
Larry Dignan of ZDNet reports on a recent presentation by Gartner analysts Johan Jacobs and Ken Brant on the relationship between IT jobs and cloud computing where they predicted that demand for data-center IT staff members will collapse by 2020. ”The long-run value proposition of IT is not to support the human workforce – it is to replace it.”
Dignan comments that “if Gartner’s post-human industry theory, which dictates that intelligent machines will drive the economy more than people pans out, then the economic implications will be huge. There is no need for a human-machine singularity to impact career prospects. Creative destruction looks great on the whiteboard, but there is a human cost.”