Cloud computing, which amounts to be the industrialization of enterprise technology infrastructure, will bring a lot of advantages coupled with a lot of lost jobs.
Few disagree that cloud computing will be disruptive to industries, enterprise technology and the way we conduct businesses. The disruption will extend to the workforce.
In other words, humans will be virtualized just like servers are. The upshot from cloud computing is that companies will need fewer data centers. People run data centers. Those jobs are likely to simply disappear.
Johan Jacobs and Ken Brant, two Gartner analysts, made the cloud computing-jobs connection last week at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. The presentation was categorized as “maverick” in that it may not happen in the allotted time frame. Jacobs and Brant argued by 2020 demand for IT staff dedicated to supporting data centers will collapse.
“The long-run value proposition of IT is not to support the human workforce – it is to replace it,” wrote Gartner in its presentation. In other words, any job loss related to offshore outsourcing may look like a walk in the park once cloud computing gets rolling.
The rough argument goes like this:
Computing will be outsourced to the cloud and become an IT utility.
Business processes will be outsourced to software. That outcome will hit all economies—especially emerging ones like India that now dominate technology outsourcing.
As the data center is virtualized the need for people to maintain that infrastructure will go away. In addition, all the people in sales and services linked to building and designing data centers will also lose jobs. When there’s less technology infrastructure to support jobs will disappear.
Some of those workers will reinvent themselves and find more opportunities. Others will never match those previous positions. Many IT workers will face hollowed out job prospects just like factory workers did as the U.S. manufacturing base disappeared.
This cloud computing-job connection is just a whisper today. But a few executives I talked to see an offshore outsourcing backlash as a possibility for cloud computing.
If Gartner’s post-human industry theory, which dictates that intelligent machines will drive the economy more than people, pans out the economic implications will be huge. There is no need for a human-machine singularity to impact career prospects. Creative destruction looks great on the whiteboard, but there is a human cost.
Source:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/cloud-computings-real-creative-destruction-may-be-the-it-workforce/61581
