Future of IT jobs as we shift into the "cloud"

bradtechonline

Cloud computing seems to be here to stay. After going through some 2012 server labs with system center, and Hyper V the whole "send us your vmdk or vhdx to host" or build your own automated cloud internally to save costs seems to be the future. I work in a large infrastructure with a mainframe, Sparc Servers, HP-UX, AIX, and of course the traditional Microsoft setup with exchange/AD. We are doing consolidation which is going to take years. So I know I have a lot of work years ahead of me but those will go by fast. I find myself wondering what is going to go down in this career path I love as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others keep improving efficiencies and lowering costs to host parts if not all of your systems in one of their datacenters.

I don't plan on sitting around like the guys who worked at automobile plants and mills in the rustbelt as their jobs fade away. I think about this often, and have tried to keep my skills up to date and branch off into programming as the infrastructure roles vanish. In a large organization we have dedicated teams for programming, servers, and networking so I don't get I was mainly posting this to see if you guys wonder about this kind of stuff, and what your plans are if it becomes apparent that our jobs become automated within a cloud providers. Maybe just maybe the jobs won't vanish and people will just need to manage servers now hosted in another datacenter. Thoughts would be appreciated

Essendon

Exactly what you said in your last two sentences. The jobs will just shift to another datacenter. Instead of your sys admin, you'll have a cloud admin. That's all it is. As long as you keep your skills current, you should be good. Like they say - Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you dont keep moving. Work on your skills with Virtualization and Networking. As far as certs go, get yourself the VMware/Citrix/Microsoft cloud-oriented certs and you'll be okay.

Stay ahead of the curve!

tpatt100

I think it will continue to consolidate and some will stay employed and many will not as time progresses. It won't happen over night but I see customer support jobs increasing once outsourcing loses the economic advantage it has currently as China's middle class grows, I read an article that China's middle class is larger than the entire US population. So I see companies looking to China for economic opportunities in IT besides using it as cheap labor.

jfitzg

Yep, and this is why I just quit my job as a Sr. Systems Engineer to go work for Earthlink as a Solutions Architect selling their cloud services (they have a ton). Though I dont see these jobs totally going away, larger companies will have their own data centers and their own private clouds that need to be setup and maintained, dont expect them to outsource their entire data centers to companies like mine and Amazon. Plus no matter what there will always be a need for system/application administrators, desktop techs, and so on.

phoeneous

My prediction, in 10 years, everyone that has stuff in the cloud will move it back in house.

netsysllc

The amount of jobs will go down with cloud. The amount of cloud admin jobs will be significantly less than onsite system admins, as they will service more clients per admin. Less in-house support will be needed since tablets and BYOD are taking away management of desktop PCs.

NightShade1

I think wireless network engineers will be more in demand as all the access layer will be replaced from cables to wireless...
People want mobility. Desktop will dissapear... so the cables on the Access layer....
im focusing a lot on wireless... Wireless is the future
Hope im right on my guess :P

tpatt100

phoeneous wrote: »

My prediction, in 10 years, everyone that has stuff in the cloud will move it back in house.

I think for the majority of mainstream users Facebook will be the extent of "cloud storage" aka posting family albums on their page.

TheCudder

I just don't see any organizations with sensitive or classified data will not be jumpingon this "cloud" band wagon --- no matter what kind of security or privacy the 3rd party service offers. From government organizations to organizations that sell services/products to government organizations. I think these articles exaggerate how much of an effect it will have.

blargoe

Don't forget Private Cloud.

Large organizations with multiple operating companies that have traditionally operated autonomously, are working to consolidate their IP operations, at least with commodity services like e-mail, telephony, and common platforms like HR and ERP. I have been involved with two companies that have started down this path... one who is operating their own datacenter, and one who has outsourced a large part of it.

After all, how much sense does it make for the mother ship to allow 23 different Exchange Server environments, even if the companies they service are distinctly different? That's a big reason why I left my last job. All of this was going on, and I was passed over for a promotion not because of qualifications, but because of geography. I'm focusing on VCAP currently and will continue to work on cloud based technology (and near adjacencies like storage) very heavily in my learning path until I land a position that is more in line.

higherho

NightShade1 wrote: »

I think wireless network engineers will be more in demand as all the access layer will be replaced from cables to wireless...
People want mobility. Desktop will dissapear... so the cables on the Access layer....
im focusing a lot on wireless... Wireless is the future
Hope im right on my guess :P

Wireless + design + VOIP = win. Since I needed to find another job I was landed in another hybrid position (Network / Server Egineer) in which I'm getting best of both worlds (Good size network + Virtualized enviroment with Windows and Linux).

paulgswanson

My prediction, in 10 years, everyone that has stuff in the cloud will move it back in house.

Lets hope it's closer to 5 years.

higherho

^ once hackers take down the public clouds then I'm sure some people will start to pull back. Just incase, I'm still going to educate myself on the cloud stuff. Its better to stay ahead! or become a programmer.

jfitzg

phoeneous wrote: »

My prediction, in 10 years, everyone that has stuff in the cloud will move it back in house.

I doubt it, its just not cost effective for some businesses to host their own private cloud. Example, youre a small business with say 40 employees. Of course you need email, and you want high availability on your servers, would it make more sense to purchase multiple ESX hosts with significantly more hardware than you need (for fault tolerance), a decent SAN with RAID 6 (seen multiple RAID 5 arrays fail due to 2 discs going bad within a short amount of time of eachother), then you gotta purchase licenses for vmware (both ESX and vsphere), support for the hardware, oh and dont forget you need a to send snapshots offsite for proper DR so thats even more hardware you need to purchase, setup, and maintain. Oh and who is going to set all this up? A MSP at $150/hr? maintenance and problems? Another $150/hr.. All this or just pay a monthly fee to Amazon or whathaveyou which will have a significantly less TCO than doing everything yourself, plus less headaches dealing with all of the technical stuff, worrying about it failing, and more time to concentrate on running your business...

halaakajan

GE just brought their IT in house

phoeneous

jfitzg wrote: »

I doubt it, its just not cost effective for some businesses to host their own private cloud. Example, youre a small business with say 40 employees. Of course you need email, and you want high availability on your servers, would it make more sense to purchase multiple ESX hosts with significantly more hardware than you need (for fault tolerance), a decent SAN with RAID 6 (seen multiple RAID 5 arrays fail due to 2 discs going bad within a short amount of time of eachother), then you gotta purchase licenses for vmware (both ESX and vsphere), support for the hardware, oh and dont forget you need a to send snapshots offsite for proper DR so thats even more hardware you need to purchase, setup, and maintain. Oh and who is going to set all this up? A MSP at $150/hr? maintenance and problems? Another $150/hr.. All this or just pay a monthly fee to Amazon or whathaveyou which will have a significantly less TCO than doing everything yourself, plus less headaches dealing with all of the technical stuff, worrying about it failing, and more time to concentrate on running your business...

I used the term everyone loosely. Sure, for smb's with less than 100 employees it makes sense but it's the mid-size to enterprise-size businesses that wont see any cost benefit by going to the cloud. By cost benefit, I'm factoring in the lost of revenue from either a downed internet circuit or cloud failure. Again, just my prediction. Either way, I'll always have a job.

the_Grinch

I think we use the term "cloud" way too loosely. I agree that companies have to do a true cost/benefit analysis with all the need parties being involved. Sure we can host our exchange in the cloud, but what does that do to lag in regards to clients? In the event of a failure, are we prepared for the fallout? All avenues need to be considered, with cost savings being maybe third on the list.

I'm going to try to focus on programming myself. Recently there was a thread on DevOps that I really enjoyed and got me thinking that was probably the route I should go. I know a lot about infrastructure and I was able to help out the developers here due to my limited programming knowledge and my solid knowledge of servers. Programmers are definitely not going anywhere and at least I can write reports?

jfitzg

phoeneous wrote: »

I used the term everyone loosely. Sure, for smb's with less than 100 employees it makes sense but it's the mid-size to enterprise-size businesses that wont see any cost benefit by going to the cloud. By cost benefit, I'm factoring in the lost of revenue from either a downed internet circuit or cloud failure. Again, just my prediction. Either way, I'll always have a job.

Actually some mid size companies can save $$$ by going to the could for certain services such as DR. If a mid sized company only has 1 data center (or no data center but have ESX hosts onsite) and wants a 0 second RPO, would it be cheaper for them to build and maintain another datacenter or rent a couple racks from someplace like Amazon, the latter obviously. The cloud services amazon and earthlink host arent designed to replace a large company's infrastructure, only to complement it.

jfitzg

the_Grinch wrote: »

I think we use the term "cloud" way too loosely. I agree that companies have to do a true cost/benefit analysis with all the need parties being involved. Sure we can host our exchange in the cloud, but what does that do to lag in regards to clients? In the event of a failure, are we prepared for the fallout? All avenues need to be considered, with cost savings being maybe third on the list.

We are using it too loosely, and incorrectly. Pretty much all large businesses and a good portion of mid sized businesses are already on the cloud, they just use a private cloud where they host all of the ESX/Xen/Hyper-V servers on site. The services that AMazon and Earthlink host are private cloud as well but are outsourcing the hosting to a different company instead of keeping the private cloud on site. There are advantages to both but no matter what there will always be system administrators, application administrators, etc...

kriscamaro68

Don't forget about all the jobs that will be created when companies switch back from the cloud after realizing that its not secure, slow, doesn't do whhat they wanted, isn't the magical space gadget they thought it was. I think the 'cloud' is overrated and a buzz word for people to sound cool when they talk to non technical people. I would be willing to bet that most companies will keep there servers local or if they do switch will swtich back eventually.

eansdad

Companies pooling all their data into a few companies to manage sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

I agree that the term "cloud" is being tossed around to much and for different things. The issue with the "cloud" is that the catchy buzz word makes it more desirable to use. Kind of like the mp3 players no one really wanted until Apple made the iPod and it became cool to say I have an iPod.

I predict that more companies will move into the "cloud" BUT at some point some big provider is either going to get hacked very publicly (nice big targets), be involved with a natural disaster they cannot recover fast enough from or go bankrupt. At that point everyone will start to look around and think "why did we put everything in this".

Some things make sense on a small scale like small/medium sized business moving to hosted services but large corps have to much to lose if it all goes bad.

Trends I see happening in the near future ... More Help Desk, NOC, Network Engineering, Firewall and Web Server type jobs and less desktop support. The move to VDI will reduce the number of desktop people needed since the only thing that they would be needed for is hardware failure as all other services would be through the virtual desktop. I believe these large data center will have more specialized people instead of JOATs.

phoeneous

jfitzg wrote: »

Actually some mid size companies can save $$$ by going to the could for certain services such as DR. If a mid sized company only has 1 data center (or no data center but have ESX hosts onsite) and wants a 0 second RPO, would it be cheaper for them to build and maintain another datacenter or rent a couple racks from someplace like Amazon, the latter obviously. The cloud services amazon and earthlink host arent designed to replace a large company's infrastructure, only to complement it.

I don't know if it would be cheaper, I don't know how much a service like that costs in the cloud. Have you done a full financial analysis and cost comparison? How do you know the latter would be cheaper? Show me facts and dollar signs, then I'll believe you. Until then, my opinion still stands.

ptilsen

Less helpdesk and DST, more admins. That's it. I haven't seen any case studies or factual evidence that larger clouds, larger datacenters, larger organizations actually mean fewer sysadmins and netadmins per user. There is no proven economy of scale beyond a relatively small size. Heck, in my experience there is a diseconomy of scale as organizations become larger. Relatively minor subsets of administrations need entire teams. Teams get more disparate, more siloed, communicate less, etc. Instead of a small team of generalist sysadmins, a large collection of teams is required.

The only thing I have witnessed is that as infrastructure becomes more sophisticated, end-user-level tasks get shifted to the back end. We'll be supported more and more server-side technologies, fewer client-side.

blargoe

phoeneous wrote: »

I don't know if it would be cheaper, I don't know how much a service like that costs in the cloud. Have you done a full financial analysis and cost comparison? How do you know the latter would be cheaper? Show me facts and dollar signs, then I'll believe you. Until then, my opinion still stands.

I have, or at least I have been involved in one. Renting a couple of racks and subscribing to whatever their rate per kWh, BTU, Mbps, in an already established remote datacenter is much, much, much less costly than standing up your own and having to staff it yourself.

On the other hand, if you are working on a much larger scale, it becomes closer to a wash. Or if you have stringent compliance requirements or security concerns, your company may choose to incur the extra cost anyway. I currently work for part of a very large enterprise consisting of over a dozen disparate operating entites, and in our case, our Parent company owns a shared DR datacenter, we purchase/lease our own racks and equipment through our normal procurement process, but all remote operations at the remote site are outsourced.

pinkydapimp

I agree that the cloud is where things are moving. However i think we have a way to go. THere are many privacy concerns with regard to keeping important data in the cloud currently that will prevent alot of companies from becoming cloud dependent.

Aging 'Privacy' Law Leaves Cloud E-Mail Open to Cops | Threat Level | Wired.com
Without changes to the Electronic Computer Privacy Act for example "the police will continue to be able to get Americans’ e-mail, or their documents stored online that are more than six months old, without having to acquire a judge’s permission, as long as the authorities promise it is “relevant” to a criminal investigation."

inscom.brigade

I was at a GOV cloud camp recently; nobody there is jumpingin the deep end. Seems the only real interestis the possibility to conserve energy. No sensitive information will ever go to a public cloud.

Concerns that no agency currently regulates anything about the companies offering services is anissue.
I wish I could go to more cloud camps I just don’t havetime, it seems that it could be a good money maker.

Syntax

Yeah not only sensitive information is being entrusted to a third-party... What if a hacker group like Anonymous gets pissed about something and decides to DDoS the cloud provider? Guess what, lots of companies sitting around with their hands holding their d**ks. They're screwed. I see some non-essential services going to the cloud, or being used for redundancy.... But any company who puts their faith into it will probably live to regret it if anything happens.

bradtechonline

Been almost two years since I posted this. Have got a couple new certs & started studying again, and looked over my post history and saw this. Since that time we've had the NSA Spygrid exposed by Snowden costing the "cloud" industry money. Azure has came to fruition offering IaaS. Only move towards the "cloud" for my employer was Microsoft coming in, and offering something that couldn't be beat for Office 365/hosted exchange. We will still keep CAS servers on premise but move all the mailbox information to their servers. Turned up AD FS, and the process has begun for a large chunk of our exchange environment. We are still heavily invested with onprem and growing. I'm working on the MCSE 2012 R2 certification track with emphasis on Server Infrastructure and the "Private Cloud" track as well which is just System center exams they threw in there.

The real dilemma going forward is all the different choices for IaaS out there right now. Who knows what the business segment, and upper management would choose to go with. Azure, AWS, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, et all. So I'm hesitatant to cert up in any of those areas locked into a vendor. I'm also doing labs of OpenStack running on Fedora (Would use RHEL in production) . All these large companies have so much hardware and economy of scale comes into factor as they slash their prices. Been reading into puppet, chef, Ansible, and Salt which supposedly get you to one sys admin per 10,000 "servers". How has the past two years treated most of you in the era of "cloudamania".

daviddws

TheCudder wrote: »

I just don't see any organizations with sensitive or classified data will not be jumpingon this "cloud" band wagon --- no matter what kind of security or privacy the 3rd party service offers. From government organizations to organizations that sell services/products to government organizations. I think these articles exaggerate how much of an effect it will have.

I wish you were right, but the government is moving quickly in this direction with a VDI solution that will probably take my job away in 6-12 months. I could always go back to application support. I enjoyed talking with customers or clients and helping them with proprietary applications or systems. Better than remediating vulnerabilities all day IMO.

the_Grinch

We've basically been setting up a private cloud where I am (State agency). Can't store the data we will be collecting in the public cloud, but been using the cloud architecture to setup our systems. I still don't see the "cloud" (be it public or private) going away any time soon. Being able to automate so much of the work of deploying and configuring servers cannot be beat. Plus with the cost of hardware (along with the ability to run everything on bare bones server) being so cheap there really isn't a whole lot stopping a company from jumping in.

UnixGuy

I'm very pessimistic about the cloud. I think it will have a negative impact on us IT professionals. It's easier now to outsource the infrastructure to a cloud service provider:
e.g.:
Brennan IT Opens Global Services Centre in Navi Mumbai -- MUMBAI, October 17, 2014 /PR Newswire India/ --

I know you can always work for Cloud providers, but there are always cheaper remote options and you need less IT professionals than before (cutting costs, easier to manage virtual servers, SDNs,..etc)

I'm trying to change my career path from traditional sys admin to something else..probably security or presales....I don't think it's a smart move for me to remain in a traditional technical role in the next 5-10 yrs.