

IT Consumerization: The end of IT is nigh - akaffen
http://blog.cloudability.com/it-consumerization-the-end-of-it-is-nigh/
The cloudpocalypse is nigh! Here's a handy guide for surviving the end times.
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m0nty
I would love to be dis-intermediated, but everytime I've tried committing to
"cloud" technology (and other innovations) I've loved it and the people I work
with have hated it. Here's a list of things people don't get:

1\. Cloud-based backup. It's insecure, bound to be hacked - never mind the
encryption, teh haxxors can get around that stuff! So we're back to tapes and
DVDs before you know it.

2\. Virtual machines, but only if I make the mistake of telling them. It gives
some people the willies for the same reason as (1) above, plus the supposed
problems of a "shared" server. Also, if a server is outside our firewall they
think it's less secure.

3\. Google mail. They prefer Exchange for reasons which remain a mystery to
me. I hate Exchange, love Google Mail and everything that comes with it. Even
using Gmail via Outlook is mysteriously deficient for my colleagues.

4\. Google Docs. Being able to collaborate on-line is not a very big benefit.
The familiarity of MS Office is.

Things which do work:

1\. iPads. This is the machine which will put me, an IT tech, out of work.
Hasten the day.

2\. Dropbox. Simple paradigm and works with the iPad.

3\. All the clunky, difficult-to-manage, badly-designed software they've been
using for years and have come to love in all their ugliness. It makes me weep.

The thing which will change this is the arrival of younger, more IT-literate
people in the workplace. I have no problems at all with the under-30s; all the
problems in the world with people older than that (not all of them but enough
to be a permanent drag on progress). The simple fact is that these people will
even shy away from something as superb as MailChimp's or Google's admin
interfaces: too many buttons! They always get me to do it for them, and I will
have a job in IT for as long as I want it.

~~~
timwiseman
As to 1: it is in many ways insecure (though bound to be hacked might be a bit
much.) While dropbox isn't technically a cloud based backup, it can be used
that way and there was a period where a glitch left it totally exposed for
about four hours ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)#Reception>
). I actually love cloud based backup, but I encrypt my files before I send
them and I am dealing with just my own personal data. A company with data they
must legally protect would need to be wary.

As to 3: Personally, I love gmail. But from a corporate perspective, you can
still exert more control over exchange. This can be significant, especially
for highly regulated businesses that need to worry about frequent e-discovery
and may perhaps wish to take steps to limit what is sent.

~~~
m0nty
There's a nugget of truth in their concerns which makes them harder to
dismiss. Equally, can you say that local storage is more secure, tapes in a
"fire-proof" safe, etc? I have reservations about the cloud (Amazon's outage
was a wake-up moment for me) but nothing's perfect.

As for Google Mail vs Exchange, my personal opinion is that Gmail is superior
in evey way. If you need discovery, you can always shove email through your
own gateway (running Postfix) and set it to store all emails it sends and
receives. You could also use Postini which I think gives extra facilities like
discovery. Might be a bit hacky for some organisations I suppose but I've
never found Exchange that elegant or easy to manage.

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famousactress
Thank goodness.

If I can help it I'd like to only work at companies which don't have:

\- An IT Department

\- An Exchange Server

\- A sales team

In my experience, all have been a vicious waste of energy.

~~~
poppysan
How do you propose the said companies make sales without a sales team. (Not to
be snarky, maybe I am missing something.)

~~~
famousactress
In my (limited) experience sales people exist to convince people that products
have value. This is mostly useful when the people purchasing the products are
incapable of evaluating them (see: "enterprise sales"), or when the products
don't have enough value to sell themselves. Look around you. How many of the
things that you've bought have been sold to you by sales people?

The concept used to have more merit. Lots of things our parents bought were
sold to them by salespeople. Most of those same things you and I have
purchased without.

Today most of the time I see a salesperson, I see a smokescreen for a shitty
product.

~~~
benjarrell
A salesperson gets your product in the door. Without that, any potential
customers don't know, or care what you are selling, no matter how great you
think it is.

~~~
famousactress
Sure. I just want to be forced to build products so good that my _users_ do
that job.

~~~
jmduke
I think the issue with this lies primarily in young B2B companies/products,
especially ones with a large frictional cost in switching over.

~~~
famousactress
Totally... but remember that I didn't say that no company _ought to have_ a
sales team, I just said I don't want to work anywhere that does. Filtering out
B2B companies with products that have frictional switching costs is exactly
the purpose of having that kind of a litmus test.

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rnemo
Cloud and IT are not mutually exclusive. The roles they provide are so
different I can't at all see why anyone bothers to makes this apples and
oranges argument.

~~~
zerohp
Spot on, this whole argument seems to be based on a misunderstanding of what
IT does.

~~~
rbanffy
A large part of what IT departments currently do will, eventually, be replaced
by cloud-based services that are easily managed. When you hire Google Apps, a
lot of your server management disappears. When you put your servers on EC2,
you no longer need to manage the boxes they run on.

Things like custom app development, account management and things like that
will remain.

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tammer
I find it interesting that nobody's seems to recognize the primary problem
with relying on cloud services - putting the entire business in the hands of
your ISP. You can get redundant pipes, but then you're looking at the
beginning of way more overhead than the cloud DB sales team wants you to know
about.

At my office if the WAN pipe goes down, I know production will still be
happening and almost all internal processes will be unaffected. These cloud
services will probably soon replace IT for small businesses that in reality
don't actually _rely_ on software, but for major businesses where severe
downtime = doom the only option is locally hosted services.

Frankly I think this along with the rest the "end of IT" bandwagon are
spreading uninformed FUD... The industry will of course adapt to new
technology, but IT is unique in its inability to ever be completely displaced
by technology.

~~~
confluence
I agree with you.

 _But, honestly, the same thing can also be said of electricity (or
water/national defence/public transport/roads/sewerage/etc.)._

You lean on your provider completely just to keep you running, and even a
slight dip in their performance can take down your entire cluster, and
completely ruin your day/calculation/work flow (outside of temporary UPS).

Not everyone needs their own generator tammer :D.

    
    
      Different strokes for different folks!

~~~
tammer
Precisely. Not necessary for every business, but entirely necessary any
business that can't risk that kind of downtime. We've got (bare minimum) 8Kva
UPS's on every netshelter on campus. The production side uses enormous
generators and UPS's that I'd like to know more about.

All I mean to say is IT is far from dead, especially in these types of
situations.

------
j_baker
I think it's worth pointing out that we're facing the end of IT _as we know
it_. I think that the only difference the "cloud revolution" will have is
meaning that IT staff will work for some cloud provider rather than the
companies themselves.

~~~
famousactress
Perfect! This repairs the relationship because it means these people will be
responsible for _producing value_. In most organizations this is a cost center
designed (whether consciously or not) to produce friction in the name of
safety.

There's probably a TSA-privatization analogy here somewhere.

------
sleighboy
Nothing like an impartial source for an opinion. Worthless prattle.

------
stormental
If blog posts had theme songs, this one's would be by REM.

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Toshio
I believe the gist of the article is about how IT has always been (and is
always going to be) data-centric as opposed to solution-centric, and the guy
who understands how to process one petabyte in one nanosecond has a better
chance of surviving the consumerization of IT than the guy who does it in 5
nanoseconds (metaphorically speaking).

