System Admins jobs

sina2011

Hey everyone,
Whats your thoughts of the cloud do you think this will annilhate System Admin jobs in the future?

netsysllc

Cloud is going to have a huge impact on Sys Admin jobs. More and more businesses will not be able to justify having servers in house as most applications are going hosted. Even full environments are going fully hosted to where all people will work off of Citrix, View or RDP using any device they own. In 5 years it will be hard to find jobs in IT unless you have special skills or work for a larger company with in house stuff. I am sure I will get flamed for this but it is truly where I see IT going. Adapt now, make yourself relevant or get into a different career! End the end it comes down to $$$. Cloud is turning computing into the ultimate commodity.

ajs1976

That's what we heard a few years ago. did all sys admin jobs / it jobs go away? No. There may be less jobs, but there are still jobs. I see the same thing with the Cloud. Some companies will move to the public cloud and there will be job consolidation, but not all companies can or are willing to go to the public Cloud. New jobs will be created at service providers. Staff will be needed to manage connectivity and the relationship between the provider and the business.

I do agree with adapting now. It is important to keep skills current and relevant.

SteveLord

Some of those cloud services have minimum requirements of 100+ users. That eliminates a lot of businesses from using them right there.

netsysllc

Outsourcing did take away many jobs, but that affected Sys Admin type jobs much less than it did Programming and help desk. I know scores of developers who either lost their jobs or saw 99% of their departments moved to India, same with help desk. Cloud is a whole different beast. I can walk into a 50 person company and show them a TCO that will make cloud cheaper over 3 years than internally hosting the infrastructure and having an person on staff, not to mention the employees can work from anywhere in the world on most any device they want. In most cases I will win the job. Once it is at CFO or CEO level only $$$$. they will feel bad that Billy might be losing his job but that is business. Not to mention most small business applications are going cloud based. Microsoft just killed off small business server, Exchange will be office 365 only unless you spend the big bucks to keep it internally. I would say cloud affects our industry much more than outsourcing. In fact as more stuff goes cloud expect outsourcing to affect the people running the cloud.

Not trying to dissuade anybody from IT or be a doomsayer but that is what is see happening.

it_consultant

Yep, we are all screwed

How long have we been talking about the "cloud" taking all of our jobs?

kurosaki00

No

Very few jobs will be lost
Mostly jobs of an IT Guy that only did 1-2 things (which is extremely rare nowadays)
Good luck with the cloud being on call, person to person, support for the company, go to the site and talk to managers, educate users, Install tomcat on unix, 1 month later, Please install me this tomcat gui manager too and these addons and configure them, Im cheap and weird so I have IIS and Tomcat in the same server (real experience scenario), Yeah that server where my development team works and destroys and create, they dont keep records or backups, yeah please fix it because its acting "weird" but dont delete the data.

Yes... the cloud wont do that much to nowadays Sys Admins, Today Sys Admins just do too much.

TheCudder

Some one still has to manage these servers....right? Additionally, many organizations deal with data that can't be cloud based.

pram

Yeah these servers don't run themselves guys. I work on a lot of AWS stuff and its still Linux, and it still breaks. The 'cloud' isn't some magic panacea for all IT problems.

SteveLord

I thought the cloud servers got all their services and redundancy from another cloud? And so on and so forth.

ptilsen

It moves a lot of the market, especially SMB, but as others are saying, this stuff doesn't run itself. Implementing and supporting the cloud services still requires an admin from the business side. Even for really easy-to-use services Office 365, you're still not really going to businesses interface directly with cloud providers. Either admins do it or consultants (read: external, expensive admins) do it. If the provider also provides the consultants, great, but it's still teams of admins at the end of the day. You just work for CDW or Konica Minolta instead of Bill Smith's Sub-$50M Widget Firm. If we're talking larger enterprises, you're just doing different work.

There might be some job losses from overall efficiency improvements, but not enough to erase the gains from the natural growth for employment in this industry, which hasn't been stopped by the DotCom Burst or the Great Recession.