Some umbrella company IT contractors may think that there services will no longer be required if the company they are contracted to switches to cloud computing, but this is not necessarily the case.
Simon May from Microsoft explained that the skills needed by IT workers will change but there will always be a need for personnel with skills to guide others through the technological jungle.
He went on to say that IT staff have the intelligence to tailor a solution to a client’s or company’s needs and this situation will never go away. He explained that it is very hard for somebody who is extremely proficient at manufacturing widgets to understand the latest in cloud technology. Skills will change but we are unlikely to see vast redundancies in IT, he added.
Meanwhile, the first chief information officer for the US government, Vivek Kundra, has said it is ridiculous to cite privacy and data security concerns as reasons for not taking to the cloud.
The US government already spends billions of dollars every year outsourcing a lot of its IT systems so it does not make sense to avoid the cloud over data security concerns. Federal government spends £49 billion annually on IT and it is most frustrating to see projects fail because they are based on old IT models, he said. Governments should be moving away from old IT models and embracing innovation, he continued.
A recent survey by Commvault discovered that more than 33% of businesses now use virtualised servers for between 75% and 100% of their workloads.
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