Implementing cloud computing

Does the cloud put IT staff out of work?

It seems obvious – taking applications and services out of the IT department and putting them into the cloud, whether public or private, is certain to result in job losses, right?

A report from global consultancy AMI Partners published in July this year estimated that small businesses’ IT departments and the contract and channel partners they employ in the US could lose as many as 250,000 jobs over the next decade, for example, as cloud providers offer various services directly to customers.

“Automated service delivery via the cloud will reduce the need for internal IT staff,” wrote the company’s senior vice president of infrastructure research, Anil Miglani.

But according to a recent survey of 1,300 IT professionals conducted by online IT recruitment agency CWJobs.co.uk, jobs may open up elsewhere. Of those polled, 40 per cent said they thought the rise of cloud computing would actually result in more industry jobs becoming available, and only 28 per cent saying there would be fewer.

While the Indian IT services giant refused to go into exact details, or specify whether the people involved had been redeployed or made redundant, the company’s recent private cloud implementation at WiPro certainly resulted in some job consolidation.

“Before, those [applications and services] were in individual departments, which would have their own administrators in separate groups,” says WiPro chief technologist Ram Prasad K R. “The cloud brings those together for integration and combines some of those administrator roles, so there is a reduction in headcount, with more people with combined skills.”

Marion Howard Healy, senior consultant at BroadGroup Consulting, believes that the situation varies enormously according to the size of the company involved. Smaller companies are less likely to have specific IT skills in-house anyway, which makes using cloud services a much easier decision.

But larger enterprises more prone to deploy a private cloud model can offset redundant roles against new positions created in ongoing cloud management, capacity management and provisioning.

“IT often becomes a service within the organisation, and the IT department becomes the service provider,” says Howard Healy. “So things may change in what they need to do – not so much static support, but more an integrated dynamic model – and IT people need to acquire new skills.”

Fewer than half of those polled by the CWJobs survey (44 per cent) believe cloud computing will require specialist skills, though 75 per cent said they would need to gain new skills and experience to work with the technology.

Defining cloud computing: read how to evaluate the options and clarify the benefits you expect from its implementation here