Destructive Cloud Computing: The workforce will become virtualized

Because cloud computing can integrate an enterprise's existing technology infrastructure in an industrialized way, it can bring many benefits while cutting a large number of jobs.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of people will agree that cloud computing will certainly bring the industry, business technology and people a huge devastating impact on the way they do business. And for now, it seems that this devastating effect has spread to the labor market.

In short, employees are going to start virtualizing like a server. As a result of the adoption of cloud computing, the number of data centers required by enterprises will become even smaller. And because the data center needs someone to manage it, that means that such work may also disappear.

Last week, Gartner held a seminar in Orlando. At the meeting, two analysts John Jacobs and Ken Brent described the link between cloud computing and jobs. Since the predicted situation does not necessarily occur within the stipulated time, this view is considered as a type of "unconventional." Jacobs and Brent believe that by 2020, the actual market demand for technicians in data centers will disappear completely.

In a submission to Gartner, he pointed out: "Human resources are part of the need to be replaced from the perspective of promoting the long-term growth of information technology." In other words, once cloud computing begins to popularize, resulting in a large loss of jobs It would seem that the amount of work lost as a result of offshoring would seem like a drop in the bucket.

In short, the future situation will become:

Computing power will be outsourced to the cloud and become an information technology tool.

Business processes will be outsourced to software. This model will spread to all economies, while emerging countries such as India, which now dominate the technology outsourcing market, will become mainstream.

As data center virtualization continues to increase, the actual demand for infrastructure management will also gradually disappear, meaning that the corresponding human resources no longer belong to the "need to be" part. In addition, this will result in the reduction of all sales and service positions associated with the design and construction of data centers. When the technical infrastructure is reduced to a certain extent, the corresponding technical support posts will disappear.

• Of all those involved, some may find new opportunities by adjusting their direction of development. Others will encounter problems that no longer fit their original posts. For technicians, the job prospects will become the same as those factory workers face when the United States vanishes as a manufacturing base.

From the current situation, the research on the relationship between cloud computing and work position is only a forecast. Among the top executives I met, some people think that the popularity of cloud computing will lead to a rebound in offshore outsourcing signs.

According to Gartner's post-industrial theory, smart machines will drive economic development more than people, and the impact on reality will be enormous. For personal career development, human-computer interaction points can not bring a positive impact. Although theoretically, the effect of creative destruction is very good, there are still some practical problems in terms of human resource costs.

What is the probability of this association between cloud computing and jobs? Although this may be very controversial at 2020, But in the long run, I think the possibility is still very big. Jacobs and Brent emphasized several possible scenarios.

If companies choose to migrate to private clouds and hybrid infrastructures, the number of lost jobs will not be large. The reason is that the company will also need technicians and agents to maintain public cloud services.

It is also possible that the machine may serve as an aid rather than as a substitute for human work.

However, companies may also choose to liquidate their assets. The call center will be controlled by avatars and software. The degree of automation of business operations will also be substantially increased.

· A new type of technology tool will appear. They will cause the depreciation of existing assets to accelerate. In this case, the company's focus will become to control the rate of decrease in the value of existing assets.

In contrast, the latter two cases have a greater influence on the change in the number of jobs. Last week, Professor Klais Christensen from Harvard University confirmed this. Christensen pointed out that fabless semiconductor companies belong to such a situation. The result is now that Intel has become one of the few companies that actually owns the manufacturing facilities. If the company is immersed in profit margins, it will lead to the disappearance of a large number of jobs. In the long run, this situation can cause serious damage to innovation.

Gartner pointed out that this trend of worship of profit margins has spread in the industry:

CIOs are convinced that the efficiency of their own data centers, servers, desktops and business applications is very low; therefore, there is a need for rationalization over the next decade. We believe that a large number of jobs related to these inefficient assets will also be cut in the process of rationalization. According to our projections, information technology professionals, especially those responsible for data centers and applications, will see a significant reduction in end user-based companies in the United States. According to a 2011 Gartner survey of CIOs in the United States, "reducing operational costs for IT", "reorganizing IT components," and "consolidating IT operations and resources" have become key executives' strategies aims. In the same survey, we found that the two technologies that CIOs are most concerned with are "virtualization" and "cloud computing." Eighty-three percent of respondents believe that by 2020, "more than half of the company's business will go through the cloud Infrastructure for processing. "