The impact of Cloud Computing on jobs at Cloud Infrastructure Providers

My name is Aamar Hussain, I have over 10 years experience consisting of engineering to solution architecture in various verticals and at various levels. My focus is on listening to and looking at ways of resolving business challenges and obstacles with the use of Infrastructure Solutions, Pre-Sales, Post-Sales deployment and Consulting.

I have been following the cloud journey since studying for my masters in 2009 and since then have developed a keen interest in the topic, having the opportunity to work with customers at first hand and look at the challenges and issues. I feel it provides me with a good opportunity to see how cloud can be utilised and where cloud best fits the bill.

Currently I am engaged with a large telecommunications provider as a senior solutions consultant within the Converged Infrastructure Pre-Sales practice. We are a fast growing practice, focusing on Converged Infrastructure solutions (Cisco, Netapp, EMC, VMWare) within the UK’s largest Cisco reseller. Providing consultancy, design and implementation services around converged/Cloud services, primarily aligned to technologies from VMware, Cisco, EMC and NetApp.

My LinkedIn Profile: uk.linkedin.com/pub/aamar-hussain/9/1a2/2a6

My Twitter Handle: @A4MR

Which industries/LoB are the most impacted by cloud computing and why?

There are 2 perspectives: cloud service providers and cloud service consumers. I feel the following industries are currently mostly impacted by cloud computing:

• Retail – Retail business is seasonal, therefore prior to cloud computing a typical retail business had to provision the maximum amount of infrastructure required for a given busy season i.e. Christmas period, which meant over-provision for the rest of the year. This meant running additional infrastructure which results in additional financial risk and complications.
• SME’s – Allot of SME’s are looking to utilize the cloud model to drive down costs of running in house IT departments. This will have a major impact on existing staff/jobs. The speed/agility/flexibility / pay as you go characteristics of cloud suits a typical SME who need to get products into the market fast and stay ahead of the market. Appropriate audit and analysis need to be carried out on data type and existing workloads but the SME’s seems like a good use case for cloud.
• Test/Development Departments– With the easy of cloud services available in the market at the moment the test / development departments are at times by-passing the internal IT departments and purchasing their own VM’s for use which could then cause issues / concerns in terms of  increased costs / risks in governance.
• Government/Local Councils/Health/Defense – Community clouds are increasingly being utilized for Government related organizations or workloads which require greater levels of security in terms of data residence and data sharing.
• Entertainment – Wider utilization of cloud in the entertainment industry is seen with the rise of pay as you go television/streaming media. The cloud is seen as the ideal repository to hold data for testing / development of products which are synced with different season i.e. providing children’s learning programs in the summer holidays.
• Manufacturing / construction – Increased use of cloud to serve the ever changing landscape of the construction and manufacturing industry, providing SAAS, IAAS type of models for as and when a resource is required, collaboration of working on multiple projects.

Which new job opportunities are being created?

• Managing an organization’s cloud platform
• Architecting cloud services,
• Re-engineering business process
• Service management
• Contract negotiations
• Cloud Consulting
• Broker between in-house IT and Cloud providers
• Vendor management.

Are any jobs at risk?

• There will be job losses as the re-engineering of the business process takes place with a cloud model of service e.g. Low level technical resource, in-house infrastructure support and management, even Highlevel IT managers may be at risk, but there are opportunities here to re-use the resource with re-training and allowing staff to focus on core business issues.

Which skills do you need?

• Cloud solution negotiation skills i.e. does it meet the business requirements, what value does it bring to business
• Managing Cloud provider/supplier relationship.
• Cloud administrators. 
• Legal / Compliance knowledge around company information.

What are the education options?

• Self-learning
• Vendor training
• Social media
• Formal training
• Mentoring & Coaching

In Conclusion:

The whole cloud revolution is impacting the way we do IT, the way IT is consumed, the way it is delivered, the way it’s supplied. I believe that for any organization evaluating cloud, a sound strategy needs to be derived. Once the enterprise strategy is formed, you can then look at various different options around what or how you would introduce the cloud in an organization.

Cloud is built upon the foundations of virtulisation, increased bandwidth availability and various different drivers in the industry for example agility, flexibility, the need for greater transparency.

Looking into the future I see greater uptake of cloud, even if it means at first only utilising some parts of a cloud portfolio. Definitely cloud will play a huge role for IT in the years to come. It is very exciting to be part of this big transformation wave that is The Cloud.

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For more opinions on how Cloud Computing may affect your Industry and/or Line of Business (LoB) – and thus your career, read here:

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