The Cloud And IT Contractors: A Match Made In Heaven?

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: James Duval.

Cloud computing has for many years been like the Wild West of business IT – a vast, untapped wilderness full of possibilities for profit and adventure but still largely unpopulated. For the IT contractors who possessed the particular set of skills needed to traverse the cloud landscape, things have been pretty great for some time now. But the market for cloud services is changing rapidly and those original contractors are going to increasingly find themselves in the middle of a modern day gold rush where their skill set is no longer as unique as it was.

The dynamics of the cloud computing market are interesting in that together they form a classic example of a business technology where widespread understanding has lagged far behind technological innovation. As more and more businesses begin to come to terms with the fact that cloud computing is really just a set of tools that utilise a certain kind of computer network and third party hosting rather than a huge and unintelligible leap forward, the market rewards for contractors are going to start to diminish. Why is this? Well, to answer that we first need to look at why the market is currently so good for contractors…


Why the Current Cloud Market Favours Contractors

The speed and ferocity with which cloud computing ripped onto the scene a few years ago meant had a number of interesting effects. Firstly, the term almost instantly became a buzzword, meaning that its supposedly transformative and efficiency (read: profit) enhancing effects began to obscure what it actually was. Boardrooms and corporate meetings began to echo with repeated pronouncements about “moving over to the cloud” so that in the end many business people came to see the term as representing a way of doing business rather than a way of storing and utilising information…

Read more from the source @ http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/the-cloud-and-it-contractors-a-match-made-in-heaven-0588529