Well, after a year’s hiatus due to some particularly difficult personal trials, I’ve decided to come back to the block and weigh in on one of the big hot-button subjects in the IT industry – How the cloud will affect the job market.
The Push to Cloud
In the modern world, as the Internet has developed and increased in prominence in our lives, the increased infrastructure, security technology, and bandwidth is beginning to allow businesses and individuals to forgo the traditional need to pay big bucks for things like processing power and storage. Companies have been moving their critical systems into third party data-centers for years, but with the development of entirely cloud based solutions like Office 365, Azure, Google Apps, and AWS we’re starting to see a large industry push to reduce infrastructure costs by moving away from self-managed IT solutions. So now we’re starting to see another paradigm shift in the IT industry.
Now, this is not to say that IT hasn’t seen any kind of paradigm shift before, quite the contrary. It seems like every year we’re having to face some new technology that is permeating the industry. From the introduction of Ethernet, to wireless networking, to virtualization and VDI, most of us have dealt with the changes as they’ve come, learning new techniques and adjusting the way we work. But the push to cloud has a lot of IT personnel worried about their jobs.
What About my Job!?
Cost savings has been the primary driver behind the recent push to adopt cloud services. Executives around the world are salivating at the possibility of reducing their costs by shifting the responsibility of IT infrastructure management onto third parties. This shifting of responsibility has a lot of IT people on edge, knowing that if the stuff they do every day is outsourced to a third party service provider, what will happen to their job? If we have no servers or networks to maintain, am I going to lose my job?
The answer here is actually pretty simple. Unless you’re a part of some specific niche industry jobs, you’re pretty likely to keep your job.
Working IT in the Age of the Cloud
While moving to the cloud does reduce the need for critical infrastructure and complex solutions, it doesn’t really reduce the need for administration, problem solving, end-user support, and technical know-how. After performing numerous migrations from various email systems to Office 365, the one thing I’ve discovered is that moving to the cloud doesn’t really make the IT guy’s job any easier. In many ways, it actually makes things more difficult and complex, which means that if you’re a competent IT professional your job is pretty safe.
How will the Cloud Change My Job?
Now, that isn’t to say that your job isn’t going to change. Moving to the cloud requires a good deal of adaptation and adjustment to new ways of thinking and managing resources. For instance, if you want to have any kind of Active Directory integration with Office 365, you’re going to have to use Dirsync, and using Dirsync means you can’t modify things like distribution groups, user accounts, and passwords in Office 365. These things have to be managed in Active Directory, and that means that all of those really menial tasks you’ve been handing off to department heads, like adding distribution group members, are going to land right back into your wheelhouse if you’re as nervous as I am about giving people with no IT experience access to the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. For things like password changes, be prepared to face a massive influx of support calls asking for help resetting passwords as well.
In addition to the technical limitations involved with moving to the cloud, you also have to deal with the fact that you lose a lot of direct control over the IT infrastructure. Since your resources are now located on a system owned and operated by someone else, if things break you have to go to the vendor to get it fixed, and that brings up any number of frustrations, depending on who you work with. If you’ve ever spent any time on the phone with Microsoft Support, you’re likely to dread any interaction with them from that point on. You won’t have to do much of the work involved in fixing the problem, but you will have to sit around twiddling your thumbs while someone else does, and that can be a little maddening at times. This does, of course, depend on how competent the person on the other end of the phone is. Sometimes you get lucky and find someone who knows their stuff. Sadly, that’s more of an exception than a rule, so you may need to brush up on your people skills a bit and learn how to light a fire under the support technician on the phone with you.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
As more services start moving to the cloud, we’ll probably see a reduction of administrative overhead, but for now cloud solutions will feel like a major step backward to a lot of people, and it really is a step backward. You see, in the old days, most businesses that made investments in IT infrastructure would utilize systems called Mainframes. The mainframe system would perform all of the actual processing work (and was as big as a house in some cases), and people who used computers would interface with the mainframe from a system that was directly connected to it. Sound a lot like a Virtual Desktop Environment? It’s a lot like how cloud services work, too, except that with the Cloud, we replace the centralized Mainframe system with a vast, globe spanning collection of servers. It’d be like if one company owned a single mainframe that was rented out for numerous companies to use at once. As a result, we have to rethink the way we work. Luckily, this does mean fewer trips to the data-center to reboot servers or move cables around, which is a major plus for some people (not me, though. Data-centers relax me for some reason. I’m not sure if it’s the steady humming sound or 50 degree temperatures).
Niche Workers Beware!
With all of this said, there are a couple jobs that are going to start disappearing in the next few years. If you happen to work entirely in one of these areas, you should seriously consider branching out or you may soon find yourself without a reason to work.
1. Backup Operations – This is one niche where the writing has been on the wall for a while now. Companies have been moving toward high-availability solutions for some time now, which means that the need to spend copious funds on backup solutions and storage has been falling. High availability solutions generally rely on having multiple copies of critical data on multiple servers, so the loss of a single server no longer puts people into panic mode. With the cloud, data is placed in systems with so much redundancy, with such a high level of integrity, that data loss is extremely uncommon, and unrecoverable data loss is nearly impossible for some cloud solutions. So if you’re a backup operator and that’s all you’ve done for years, you might find your job under the cross-hairs. It’s time to start expanding your repertoire.
2. Hardware maintenance – To me, it should be obvious that computer hardware specialists are going to see less work with the move to cloud, since there is a definite drop in the amount of server and network hardware required when your company is running there, but I figured I should at least mention it.
3. Internal Network Administration – This particular job won’t ever go away, but with cloud solutions we may see a definite drop in the complexity and overhead required for running a LAN, and the concept of the WAN may begin to disappear as satellite offices will only require an Internet connection to access company resources located in the Cloud.
4. IT Infrastructure Design Specialists – Since the cloud consists almost entirely of prepackaged solutions, the demand for complex architectural designs will start to disappear, meaning that people who make their living designing and implementing IT infrastructure solutions are going to have a lot less work to do. This is the one that makes me sad, since I really enjoy Infrastructure Design. As the cloud push progresses, Infrastructure design will change from designing solutions to developing solutions for managing and interfacing with cloud-based services (which is not nearly as much fun).
5. SAN management – The concept of the Storage Area Network isn’t really even into adolescence yet and here we’re moving away from it? Well, yes, pretty much. As the cloud sees greater levels of adoption, the need for people who focus on the management, provisioning, and optimization of centralized data storage are probably going to see less work.
Now, I’m not saying that these niche jobs will disappear entirely. Nor is this a comprehensive list of jobs that the cloud will be making less important. There will always be companies who avoid the Cloud like the plague, and they’re going to need people who know their stuff. But what I will say is that if you focus in these areas alone, be prepared to branch out or you’re probably going to start spending your days working for a cloud service provider like Microsoft, which might not be as much fun as working for a (much) smaller company.
Adapt or Die
In the end, the cloud will simply force IT professionals to do what most of us do best, adapt to changes in our surroundings. We’ll need to change the way we think and interact in our jobs to be successful in our careers, but we should still have careers despite the changes to the IT landscape.
Thanks for the insight acbrownit.
I know this is an old post but it seems that “internal network administrator” never seemed like a niche job to me as it can still touch many areas on its own. Did you have a suggestion of areas to branch out to for Network Admin staff or even suggestions for people in general who want to adapt to the new world? Great post.
Everyone certainly needs to understand networking to a certain degree to be really capable in IT, but there are some larger environments who have staff dedicated solely to the configuration and maintenance of their Internal networks (as opposed to WANs and MANs). As network speeds have increased and technology has advanced, though, there is less need for network traffic segregation. With Cloud services, there is even less need for VLANs associated with storage, database replication, and other traffic that has historically necessitated more vertical network design. As more services become available in the cloud and used there, internal networks, I think, will become much less complex.
There will always be a need for network admins, but I think much of that work will move into datacenters run by larger corporations as the cloud is adopted by businesses, so the demand for network admins will probably start to decline. Much of the network, uhh, work, will switch from LAN configuration to connectivity between cloud solutions and their customers. Site-to-site VPNs will become more common and work on edge networks will be more important, so those would be where I would recommend expanding (if you haven’t already gotten into those things).
Thanks for your prompt reply. That does make quite a bit of sense. As a “new worker” in a medium organization with lack of staff, I`m currently in a `jack of all trades` type. Specialist of none really, but master of not too much. The one nice thing is the exposure to everything to a competent degree. My education actually routes from the IS side with the analyst skills being the ones honed the most. Your post had gotten me thinking on whether or not continuing in the full IT position is the way to go for me or if with the new emerging technologies and changes to the IT job industry, means I should go back to looking at the business analysis side while I still can.
There’s always going to be a need for good IT workers. You’re in a good position to start your career, to be honest. Having to touch everything will give you a good foundation to build on and help you decide what parts of it you enjoy. The emerging technologies won’t decrease the need for IT workers, but it will certainly decrease the demand for certain types of IT work. If you have a good foundation and are willing and able to learn, you probably won’t have to worry too much about having to completely retrain yourself.
I can’t believe you didnt even give an honorable mention to cloud security. With companies, governments and Individuals storing their data in “the cloud” not adapting to cloud security would be a mistake.
Cloud security is a big subject in itself, to be honest. For this post, though, I tried to stick with the changes the cloud makes to general IT operations, rather than getting into the pros/cons of moving to the cloud.