Re-tooling for the cloud future

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I guess that just as other industries and trades grow up and evolve, so must the IT industry.  And it’s funny saying that because IT moves so fast and seems to be evolving all the time.  But in the time I have been living and working in IT, the shift to cloud style services is probably the biggest shift since the move to Domain servers and Active Directory.

For so long the big tech industry has been telling consumers what to use.  And instead of making things easier, engineers have created software and systems which are inelegant and clumsy. Things like Domain controllers, Active Directory and Virtualisation are cool but they weren't created for the end user.

This was never really a problem, but now that IT is a major part of any business, and IT is a major part of all our lives, users are demanding software and systems that THEY want to use.  The battle for IT Pro’s is to accommodate them, as less and less can we get away with saying it can't be done.

For this reason, the cloud is going to change the way IT Departments operate as they will be offloading more and more services into the cloud.  Another change is going to be the level of expertise, and/or experience needed to work. The emphasis will be off the desktop and onto the browser. Coders in the web languages and server technologies should be in high demand as medium to larger companies look to create and roll-out their own custom clouds.

Is this then the end for the IT pro? Well, of course not, the future is just in the sky.  But it could become the end for those of us who have our heads down in our servers and don't retool for the future.  It may sound funny, IT techs not retooling, but there are many that are stuck in the previous MS way of life that just can't see the future coming, even if MS is heading in that direction.

An example is the older Tech that I met while doing some work with a trainee.  He was having a go at me for not teaching the fundamentals of IT, and discussing things like servers and enterprise with the trainee.  The problem is that for today, up and coming tech servers and enterprises are the fundamentals of IT.  What a kid could do with Google Apps and Carbonate or Dropbox could replace a MS domain, Exchange, and all those expensive and complicated Rsync scripts we spent years perfecting.  Whether it is better or not is not the question, it can do the job, and in today's IT landscape, that is the main goal.

Even though I'm open to the cloud, I'm also very aware of the security issues facing it.  I'm very vocal about making the right decisions as to which services clients move to the cloud.  But more and more clients are coming to me with cloud services and asking if we can use them.  The problem I find myself in is that these services are so easy to use and offer so much at a reasonable price that the clients are willing to take the risk.

Set up Google Apps, ZohoInvoice, Dropbox and most startups or new businesses can get to work without most of the IT headaches and infrastructure that you would have needed even a year ago.  One of my new clients will be set up and invoicing without buying a box copy of anything, and this includes development servers.  And this sort of setup is by no means out of the grasp of any connected new or old business.

So where is the future of the IT Pro then? Well, I believe that is going to be in the cloud as well.  One of the biggest issues with the cloud is security.  It will never matter how convenient the cloud gets, they will never be able to secure it to the level of an in-house IT solution.  So how can you get what the user wants and what it IT level secure? The answer is a personal cloud.  A cloud solution that is developed in-house, and hosted in-house.

Jason Remnant

...if it isn’t Broken, then the answer might be in the cloud.