We survey the cloud’s effects on nine classes of IT jobs: Architects and sys admins win, middle managers and tech specialists lose — what about you?
Winners: System administrators Other than architects, the jobs undergoing the greatest change as cloud encompasses the data center are those involving hands-on system administration.
Best Microsoft MCTS Training, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com
Architects may design and tune cloud infrastructures, but system administrators do the detailed work of spreading workloads across servers, virtual servers, and data centers, assigning CPU cycles, memory, storage, and other resources as needed to keep performance high.
“If you don’t change job descriptions so sys admins aren’t restricted to one silo — because the applications and VMs in an internal cloud aren’t restricted, either — you’re letting the potential gain in efficiency for IT people go to waste,” says Forrester analyst Dines. “You can’t get the most out of a cloud infrastructure if your admins are still suck in older ways of doing things.”
At VMware, for example, Egan thought it made more sense to distribute IT staffers to individual business units according to the amount of IT resources used by that unit. Rather than working in the data center and being responsible for supporting a business unit, they’re located in and responsible to IT managers within that business unit — feeling and being treated as a part of the business-unit team rather than as support from outside the department, Egan says.
Related Content
But cutting the absolute connection between system administration and physical hardware doesn’t eliminate the need to maintain the hardware, consultant Olds notes. “You have to have people handling the hardware itself or the networks, but a lot of the things we used to do have gone away,” Olds says. “You don’t usually have someone sitting and rebuilding a server for hours or days. If a server goes bad, you pull the card out of the chassis, throw it away and slot in another. Or you close out the VM and provision another. Then you go on to the next thing. It’s a far higher level of efficiency.”
Winners: Front-line IT managers Lower-level IT supervisors and managers will also have to make major changes to their responsibilities and daily routines under cloud infrastructures — and for the same reasons that apply to sys admins, consultant Cramm says: If all the system administrators are responsible for processes running in portions of the cloud distributed throughout the company, it makes no sense to have their direct supervisors locked in the old silos.
IT gains from loosening organizational structures so that people are assigned to support specific business functions or business units, rather than to a specific server, says James Staten, a cloud computing and infrastructure analyst at Forrester Research. Most companies moving into cloud or virtual computing for the first time don’t appreciate how restrictive organizational silos can be in slowing or stopping a migration, even if the only problem is the need to continually make ad hoc decisions about who is responsible for which workloads or Web services, he adds.
The result of the cloud for IT supervisors is a role similar to the one they have today but in a far larger environment — one that could encompass the whole enterprise rather than just one facility.
