Will the Cloud Take Your Job?
The evolution of cloud computing has certainly made life easier for business leaders and CIOs all around the world. Many seasoned IT professionals have started to ask themselves, “Will the cloud overtake my job?” The reason many people are starting to ask this is because they notice that their skillsets are either antiquated or becoming less useful. The cloud looks to make everything in IT easier. Take software defined networking for example. Better known as SDN, software defined networking lets administrators setup a corporate VPN within seconds.
The old way of achieving the tasks that SDN has solved required hiring infrastructure experts either as contractors or full time employees to carry out these tasks. Since everything in the cloud cannot be defined and emulated, it makes many of these skillsets obsolete because much of these realms of computing have been figured out. What can an IT professional do? A Microsoft study conducted a couple years ago said the cloud industry will create 14 million new IT jobs by year’s end.
At the expense of these new jobs, the old jobs will be gobbled up. Many experts think that IT help desk crews may not be needed in the future. Why? Because many companies have stated that they will begin using thin clients and virtual desktops hosted in the cloud. Since there is nothing operating at the desktop level, a person having an issue with their virtual machine can simply request a reset so that they can start over with a fresh new instance of applications.
Many job duties of a cloud administrator will be consolidated because so much of the responsibilities of current IT staff will be eliminated. The idea behind the cloud was to save on costs, assign tangible metrics to IT and deliver services in a much simpler form. Once this is achieved within an organization, you’ll begin to see current IT staffers begin to wear additional hats inside the organization. Why employ a full time help desk staff when a user’s problem can be fixed by installing a new client or resetting the virtual machine?
A cloud administrator will most likely be proficient in reporting data, installing and replacing private cloud hardware and have a feel for all of the applications inside an organization. A cloud administrator will more likely have a consulting role as opposed to a hands on role. This has caused many IT professionals to seek out knowledge on their own because so many colleges and universities are behind on the rapid evolution of cloud computing.
