The Impact of Cloud Computing on IT Departments and Personnel

IT Editorial

Tuesday, 30 December 2008 16:20

Written by Tsvetanka Stoyanova

While the potential of cloud computing can't be denied, it is not realistic to expect (or maybe fear) that cloud computing will solve infrastructure and staffing issues in IT departments in general and in data centers in particular.

In a recent interview for ComputerWorld, Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google (W.W. Norton, 2008) talked about some of the possible implications of cloud computing for IT departments. Fears of vendor lock-in are common among IT execs because it is obvious that a cloud requires a lot of investment and for small cloud service providers the amount of money required to enter this market is sort of prohibitive, which in turn could lead to a situation, where only large companies operate clouds and this will make the users of the service dependent on them.

In a sense, this looks like a vicious circle – when you use cloud computing services, your hands aren't tied because you can't find skilled personnel but you become more dependent on vendors and on cloud computing providers. It is difficult to say which of the two options is worse. While it is too early to panic that cloud computing has turned you into a hostage of vendors' dictate, one of the more eminent fears related to cloud computing is that the cloud will eat jobs.

A couple of months ago lack of qualified IT staff was a hot issue. But now, when the economy is deteriorating further and further, and no chances of improvement are to be seen in the near future, slowly fears of layoffs start to surface. When an IT department uses the service of a cloud computing provider, this automatically means that the volume of in-house workload drops, which in turn leads to fewer people who are needed to service this volume. In brighter economic times, this wouldn't be a problem because when fewer people are needed, those who are not in demand any more, will simply look for a new job and there is no drama. But now, when finding any new job, not to mention a better one, is kind of hard, any hints of possible downsizing and headcount reductions cause fears.

Yes, if a data center increases the use of cloud computing, this will lead to decreased demand for personnel and will allow to shrink the IT department but as experience shows, there are always people who are needed onsite in order to be a point of contact when problems with third parties (in this case the providers of cloud computing services) occur, so it is not probable that the whole IT department will be laid off.

It is hard to predict how cloud computing will develop in the near future and beyond that but it looks like that even if there are headcount reductions, the cloud will hardly be the main reason for that. Cloud computing is still in its infancy and there aren't many organizations that rely heavy on it. Additionally, cloud computing as a technology still has many limitations, which can't be solved overnight, so any expectations/fears of a potential rapid adoption of cloud computing in the short term are ungrounded.

For many types of applications cloud computing is still inapplicable because of a myriad of reasons, starting from security issues, reliability concerns, and in some cases even price. So, in the short-term cloud computing is not a threat to IT department employees. Well, when you lose your job, it isn't much of a comfort that you have lost your job because of the crash of the stock exchange and not because of cloud computing but for now cloud computing doesn't look that much of a danger.

What is more, for many data centers cloud computing could be the life-belt. If you have already invested (at least partially) in new infrastructure and you have a lot of free capacity, now you can offer your services to companies which haven't done the same and which now, despite the drop in volume of their work, are looking for affordable offers. If a data center decides to expand its activities in the direction of offering cloud computing services to external organizations, this will require hiring new people, training them, integrating them within the existing teams, etc. In this case it is quite likely to witness an increase of the headcount, rather than layoffs.

There isn't a single answer to the question how cloud computing will affect IT departments and personnel. For some IT departments cloud computing might be bad news, while for others it might be the way out of a tough situation. In any case, cloud computing will slowly but surely get its place in IT and this could happen sooner than we expect. Anyway, cloud computing is not that bad and once its issues are sorted out, or at least are reduced to an acceptable level, cloud computing will be used in many more enterprises, so the sooner one is prepared for that, the better.

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