Changes in IT jobs: Winners and losers in the cloud era

Summary: Many people think that cloud computing will change everything in the IT world for the simple reason that the PC first realized the ability to let non-technical people create large numbers of spreadsheets at random. By contrast, cloud computing has made technology more far-reaching for democratization.

Many people think that cloud computing will change everything in the IT world for the simple reason that the PC first realized the ability to let non-technical people create large numbers of spreadsheets at random. By contrast, cloud computing has made technology more far-reaching for democratization.

The Internet revolution allows ordinary people to solve problems through Google, without the need for good memory and rich knowledge. Although cloud computing is not as far-reaching as the Internet revolution, it is no less significant, says Dan Olds, founder of Gabriel Consulting. Cloud computing enables non-technical people to access the most sophisticated software, storage, and data quickly and cheaply-whether it is involved or not-and these visits can help them do a better job.

Business executives career development and strategy consultancy Valudance's founder Susan Cramm says CIOs used to deal with occasional rogue IT projects; Now they have to deal with so many business managers who have built a huge organization that is equivalent to several IT departments through credit cards and normal operating budget funding. In fact, 65% of managers are trying to maintain their own IT budgets-part of the money from their normal operating budget-and they can simply buy SaaS or cloud services without spending it.

What does this mean for IT jobs? Some statistical data from IDC give us a hint:

According to a survey of participants at the IDC Cloud Leadership Forum in June, One-third of all IT organizations will be providing cloud services to business partners, instead of providing internal IT services, by 2014.

On June 20, IDC forecast global IT cloud services that spending on public cloud services (including SaaS) would account for 46% of all new IT spending by 2015. And SaaS will account for One-third of these expenditures, which makes SaaS and cloud service providers play a leading role in corporate partnerships.

"This does not mean denying all job descriptions and institutions, but making new demands," said Sean Hackett, analyst at 451 Group, a market research firm. Although there are many commonalities, people's perceptions are changing. Ultimately, most of it looks more like a project office than it is now, when most field operations are done in-house. ”

Where is the change happening? The following categories are based on who is the winner, who is the loser, and who has to make changes in the cloud computing age.

The biggest winners: Enterprise architects

Analysts and it vendors think the biggest change has been a significant increase in the position. The position of an enterprise architect is considered too esoteric for many companies and is too narrow and practical for other companies.

VMware Chief information Officer Mark Egan says the biggest enemy of the corporate architect is themselves. Egan said: "Only by mastering the real top technology can we control all aspects of technology." You will find that although many people have a deep knowledge of technology, they are unwilling to tell anyone. They may just want to sit down and draw these systems on their drawings, but they don't know how to find someone who wants to work with them. ”

Egan says the most important it position in an organization where IT infrastructure has been virtualized, abstracted, and isolated from the external cloud platform is the Enterprise Architect.

"Architecture includes systems, databases, networks, etc., and architects are typical system designers," said Chris Wolf, Gartner's virtualization and cloud computing analyst. Although this position has been highly conceptualized, they are very specific. He said: "Behind these abstract concepts is like a physical server for the refinement of resources management and, as well as performance requirements scheduling." Server farms, data centers, or the handling of large numbers of variables on smaller servers will be replaced with a cloud-based infrastructure where you can allocate resources such as memory, CPU cycles, bandwidth, or I/O to your organization. ”

Rachel Dines, a Forrester infrastructure and operations analyst, said that in the cloud infrastructure, applications, networks, and servers were more complex than the relationships in traditional infrastructures. This sentence shows the essence of the architect.

Although architects are an abstract concept in people's minds, the fact that this position focuses more on key details than on keeping everything running well. For example, "people don't usually consider adjusting the performance of a cloud or virtual system," Patrick Kuo said. Patrick Kuo, an independent advisor, has helped Dow Jones, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Defense Information Service to build a network and virtual server infrastructure.

He recommends starting with the right servers and processors-ensuring that each section has sufficient power, memory, caching, and reliable high-speed network connectivity-and then dividing the main functionality into the entire infrastructure to help circumvent bottlenecks in the computing chain, or prevent a place from concentrating too much workload.

Kuo said: "In many cases, the four-tier architecture can help us achieve the highest performance compared to the traditional three-tier architecture, because it puts the buffer layer on the front end, the application server controls most of the logical lines, and the network server and database replicas support them." ”

Winner: System administrator

In addition to architects, as cloud computing is pervasive in the data center, another position that has changed dramatically is the system administrator.

Architects are responsible for designing and adjusting the cloud computing infrastructure, while system administrators are specifically responsible for allocating workloads in servers, virtual servers, data centers, tuning CPU cycles, memory, storage, and other resources needed to maintain high performance.

Dines, a Forrester analyst, said: "If you don't change the job description, then the system administrator will not be confined to a separate place-because the internal cloud applications and virtual machines are not confined to a certain place--so you're wasting IT staff's potential productivity." If your administrator is still using the old ways to do this, you will not be able to take full advantage of the cloud infrastructure. ”

It is more reasonable for Vmware,egan to assign IT staff to an independent business unit based on the IT resources used by the department. Rather than having them work in the data center and be responsible for supporting the business, it is better to assign them to the IT managers in their business units--and to support them as members of the business unit team rather than as outsiders.

Olds that cutting off the specific connection between system management and physical hardware does not eliminate the need for hardware maintenance. "You have to have someone to deal with the hardware or the network, but many of the things we've encountered are disappearing," Olds said. "You no longer need to spend hours or even days monitoring or rebuilding a server," he said. If a server fails, you only need to pull the blades out of the rack, discard them, insert a new blade, or void the failed virtual machine, enable the new virtual machine, and then continue to do the work you are doing. This has led to a significant increase in efficiency. ”

Winner: Front-line IT manager

In the cloud infrastructure, the responsibilities and day-to-day work of the grass-roots IT managers and managers will also change significantly, in the same reason as the change in the position of the system administrator. "If the system administrator is in charge of the programs that run throughout the company's cloud computing, it is clearly unreasonable to keep their direct regulators in the traditional isolation sector," Cramm said.

James Staten, a Forrester cloud computing and infrastructure analyst, said it was heavily deployed in a loose organizational structure, which also led to people being assigned to support specific business functions or business units rather than specific servers. When most companies migrate to cloud computing or virtual computing for the first time, they are unaware of how well-organized, isolated divisions can hinder or prevent migration.

The role of it supervisors in the cloud era is similar to their present role, but the scope of their responsibilities is broader, encompassing the entire enterprise, not just a facility.

Changed positions: CIO and senior IT manager

As with grassroots it supervisors, the responsibilities of senior IT managers are expanding, and barriers between positions are melting to accommodate more flexible infrastructures.

"Most of the computing power and applications used by representative companies are from Salesforce.com, Amazon, Google, or other service providers," Staten said. If you plan to connect and integrate with the rest of your infrastructure, you need someone who can identify the standard interfaces, improve service levels, and decide which service providers to choose. ”

In the past, chief information officers or IT executives responsible for outsourcing agreements were the only people who were able to access such external connections, Forrester's Dines said.

Changed positions: Contract and Service Manager

Cramm says that handling service level guarantees, finding or selecting the best provider for a particular IT service-whether it is a SaaS company, an external cloud provider, or an internal it---is not within the reach of many of the IT staff responsible for handling the field-operational workloads. "You typically negotiate with a host of SaaS providers or platform providers, and you have to be able to negotiate and perform technical integration while managing these contracts with great skill." ”

Cramm warns: "There are a lot of technical problems in consolidating with external providers because cloud computing sounds magical, but according to our experience on Amazon, if you don't do a thorough investigation and don't sign the right contract, you won't get what you need, Businesses spend money to buy services and businesses want to get a lot of access. ”

Managing external vendors and contracts is the second responsibility of many IT professionals, who focus on companies that outsource most or all of it, Olds said. Employees in such companies are more likely to adapt to external management challenges associated with cloud computing.

Changing positions: Enterprise developers

Staten, an analyst at the Market Research institute Forrester, said the number of software companies used was not less than in the past because they did not write or customize software that suited them.

Companies can get a lot of software from Salesforce.com or other SaaS providers, which means they don't have to have core functionality built into these applications.

They need to maintain data and databases, as well as custom services for specific data, to make common SaaS applications better suited to their workflows and data, but these jobs are much less than in the past. "You're not actually customizing Salesforce to meet your needs," Staten said. You've just made some tweaks through the APIs, documents, and simple tools they provide. "It's mostly about tweaking your internal workflows to match them to the services that your SaaS provider has chosen to offer." In a way, this is actually more useful because you've learned how to standardize, not customize everything.

Cramm predicts that the demand for developers in cloud-oriented enterprises will continue to grow – a small amount of research and development work within the enterprise, most of which will be provided by external providers.

Losers: It middle-level administrators

If a group of people in the IT industry is suffering from the negative impact of cloud computing and the popularity of virtual systems, then it is the middle-level manager of it. They fall somewhere between grassroots supervisors and managers who work directly with CIOs. "Consider if you have a network, application, and storage system administrator who has a bridging bridge between isolated departments, why do you have to set up an independent administrator for each isolated unit?" said Gartner analyst Wolf.

He added: "As these isolated sectors become obsolete, IT management will be flattened." Generalists who can do many things are more important than professionals who can only do one thing. ”

Losers: Technical Experts

451 Group analyst Hackett says expertise is the best capital to find a job or get a promotion in an IT organization in a network, security, storage, or other it area. But this is no longer the case in the cloud era.

It personnel engaged in cloud-based application development need to understand the network, storage, security, user interface, and other infrastructure involved in the application. "It no longer requires skilled professionals to maintain data centers at the grassroots level," Hackett said. They require only one person who is able to approach the rack, pull out the defective motherboard, insert the new motherboard, and finally lock the rack. ”

That means it needs a lot of people who can do different things, Olds says, rather than being able to do a few things perfectly. "The big trend we're seeing is that companies are more willing to hire these technologists from outside on a temporary basis," he said. The IT industry will increasingly favor it generalists, who have a much higher level of skill than ever before. Within the company, this can be said to be a very good thing because you can hire experienced people, but it is not a good thing for those who are just out of school to apply for their first job or second job, and those who have just started their careers. They have a lot of technical hurdles to overcome. ”

Jobs with unknown prospects: IT support and help staff

Analysts say predictions that help people and IT support staff will die are still controversial, as users need more help than it can provide.

As enterprise applications become more intuitive, increasingly network-oriented, and enterprise applications can be purchased from the App Store, users can find the applications or resources they need through the browser, leading to a reduction in demand for phone support services or onsite repair of computer services.

Olds said: "If the enterprise put all the applications on the Web interface, then they exist in the cloud, through the VDI Virtual Desktop infrastructure for these desktops remote management or preparation." You can solve the problem by shutting down the virtual machine and restarting the virtual desktop for the user, or by going online and then logging in. ”

In addition, Olds points out: "The key to supporting a large cloud infrastructure is automation-to automate the solution of the end-user problem, password reset, reconfiguration, new resource provisioning, and so on." ”

Olds says, of course, these automated implementations can reduce the need for support staff, but "you'll find that companies often hire these people to switch to other things, or to temporarily assign them to do something else and make them part of a fire brigade." ”

(Responsible editor: admin)