[mrmtampa]

There is a discussion on Slashdot regarding this InfoWorld article; IT jobs: Winners and losers in the cloud era.

Will your job change? Or go away?

 

[modder]

Luckily my job remains unchanged really.

 

[Hanna]

I don't think my job even knows what the cloud is, so I'm guessing I won't be affected, either. But then, I don't work in IT.

 

[modder]

I don't think my job even knows what the cloud is, so I'm guessing I won't be affected, either. But then, I don't work in IT.

To be fair most people don't know what the cloud is.

 

[russcasey]

Overall that article is completely in line with our experience.

It was about 3 years ago that our MD stood up at our annual user conference and scared the **** out of most of our customer base by saying we'd be moving to be cloud based. 3 years later and that vision has mostly come true - our software is much easier to deploy and maintain, and many of our customers are enjoying this benefit. We can monitor usage and scale the environment automatically to ensure it never goes slow, and metrics can show us what the popular features are and help guide our future development.

The implications for solution developers is almost overwhelmingly positive, as our example shows - you can build and scale solutions far more cost effectively than ever before. You no longer need to support 100's of different web servers all running your app on different customer networks for different organisations. You concentrate your efforts on the upgrade and support of one environment, and every customer benefits from this.

For company IT departments there is a potential to lose maintenance work - they no longer need to support a roomful of application servers. However there is still a need for administration - even google apps needs a domain admin to create and configure user accounts. Project work will become more prevalent as new solutions can be selected and deployed at an increased pace but it can be harder to get disparate systems to work together. Also sorry but user support is never going to go away (are you SURE its plugged in?).

 

[Pen]

I don't work in IT, or even in anything remotely computer/internet related, so I don't think my job will be affected by the cloud. But who knows-- it could spread to other, non-directly internet related areas, and then I could be affected. Maybe.

 

[Jason]

Overall that article is completely in line with our experience.

It was about 3 years ago that our MD stood up at our annual user conference and scared the **** out of most of our customer base by saying we'd be moving to be cloud based. 3 years later and that vision has mostly come true - our software is much easier to deploy and maintain, and many of our customers are enjoying this benefit. We can monitor usage and scale the environment automatically to ensure it never goes slow, and metrics can show us what the popular features are and help guide our future development.

The implications for solution developers is almost overwhelmingly positive, as our example shows - you can build and scale solutions far more cost effectively than ever before. You no longer need to support 100's of different web servers all running your app on different customer networks for different organisations. You concentrate your efforts on the upgrade and support of one environment, and every customer benefits from this.

For company IT departments there is a potential to lose maintenance work - they no longer need to support a roomful of application servers. However there is still a need for administration - even google apps needs a domain admin to create and configure user accounts. Project work will become more prevalent as new solutions can be selected and deployed at an increased pace but it can be harder to get disparate systems to work together. Also sorry but user support is never going to go away (are you SURE its plugged in?).

Did you try turning it off and back on again...

The IT Crowd.

 

[Dee]

I work on web-related things already, so I don't see what I do being particularly affected by the cloud. My spouse is a computer technician; I think that job is also unlikely to be affected.

 

[russcasey]

Did you try turning it off and back on again...

The IT Crowd.

Yay - a fellow fan!

I often refer to my CB as "The internet" when showing it to colleagues. It is so small and light, and wireless!

 

[woods]

Most people out there have no idea what the 'cloud' is and perhaps will never know for sometime. The 'cloud' concept is being partly implemented but we still making baby steps.