How IT professionals work

Cloud computing is changing how IT professionals work. However is it putting them out of work? Not likely, say cloud providers.

The argument is that cloud computing automates tasks that, in the past, have been performed by employees, and that afterwards automation occurs, those people would no longer be needed.

Infrastructure services and in-house data centre operations will likely shift to providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft during IT teams will be required to configure these services, integrate them with business operations, carry out updates and load data to the cloud.

Davies acknowledges that data centre technicians – staff who instal on-site servers – will likely become redundant in companies that embrace cloud computing, nevertheless that technicians' jobs in bigger companies using cloud could become more sophisticated.

Business analysts in charge of company operations, as so then as software integration engineers in charge of making sure the cloud and the business stay connected and updated, might be looking at even heavier workloads depending on the size of the company and its cloud-based operations, said Davies.

Job-seeking IT engineers beg to differ: "Cloud computing is great, however over time, there will be some big players that will provide nearly all external cloud services, leaving the internal IT staff without a job. You might just need a small group of IT staff to provide infrastructure services for your organisation," said Sebastian Bammer, an IT engineer in Vienna.

The reason many are wrong about cloud computing'

"The reason many are wrong about cloud computing's effect on employment is that they assume this disruption is unleashed in a static environment," said Ben Golden, chief executive of the HyperStratus consulting firm in California.

"But, the field of computing has never been static, and will not be in the face of cloud computing," Golden said.

Whole range of infrastructure

Cloud computing describes a whole range of infrastructure, software, data or applications residing in the cloud – in other words to say, off your own premises and accessed via the Internet.

A study carried out by the University of Milan, published in 2010, estimated that cloud computing has the potential to create 1.5 million new jobs in Europe over the then five years.

While businesses and governments wax lyrical about the benefits of cloud computing, EU regulators have been more wary, as furthermore use of cloud systems would mean a large swathe of public and commercial data would migrate to servers possibly located outside the EU.