Biz sends apps to public cloud, waves 'bye to on-premises server folk. NO! WAIT! Research has found businesses need to hire more server staff – but they're in limited supply. In the latest Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure study, 451 Research finds that 64.7 per cent of its respondents are wanting to recruit server-focused staff, up from 62.1 per cent a year ago, due to business …
" ...once a product has a critical mass of a captive market, the vendors hike the prices and the costs go up."
True, of course, but I think we're still entitled to be bemused at the monumental gullibility of boardroom primates who apparently cannot think beyond the next quarter's spreadsheet (except when fixating on their annual bonus for "cost cutting"), who otherwise enjoy the planning horizon of a dog plotting the interment of a favourite bone and—get this!—just keep on, time after time, offering their entire business to the latest fad, fashion, garish primary-coloured MBA wheeze and vendor/outsourcer/consultancy/Queen Anne's Revenge.
There are some well-reasoned arguments for making selective, intelligent, sceptical, eyes-wide-open use of "cloud", especially for startups and businesses which have bits that operate in startup-like ways (e.g. trialling new ideas, processes etc). It even makes sense to put some of the quotidian large-scale data and process stuff out there, if you can genuinely maintain a cost-benefit advantage in the long term and providing you've really, really thought through the security and privacy issues. Even then, you need to know exactly how your business will continue and at what cost when that cloudy system becomes unavailable, sluggish, compromised, corrupted, shut down by federal fiat, pillaged by fiendish orientals, blown up by the Slough sub-branch of the Basingstoke Against Revanchism Faction etc.
What floors me is the suicidal gormlessness which is inherent is putting so many of your important eggs in one basket—a basket which you not only do not control, but which is controlled by an entity whose specific reason for existence is to squeeze you till the pips squeak and which—with the loving care normally seen only in Hollywood movies depicting assassins attaching silencers to improbably attache-cased rifles—utterly devotes itself to contriving services, suites, ToCs, dependencies, processes and financial mazes specifically designed to make it excruciatingly difficult and expensive for you ever to switch away from them. Or even scratch your arse.
This seems to apply to outsourcing generally, and not merely the "cloudy" bits.
Yes, there may be an initial apparent cost saving in splurging your corporate jewels because some slime-in-a-suit said "Trust me, guv", and yes, that may engorge the annual bonus as you haemorrhage well-paid staff who actually knew how things worked, but in the long term ... well, in the long term, your company became a hostage.
"The 45'ers say 69.7 per cent of respondents said current candidates lack skills and experience."
That's always the case when you demand x years of experience and offer a salary appropriate to x/4 years, especially when the product version in question has only been available for x/10 years.
I realised the stupidity of HR and "Strategic focused IT Managers" (IT Managers who don't have an ounce of IT experience) just after graduating Uni in 2003, when I saw an an job ad for "a .NET developer, must have 10 years experience!"..
If you can't spot the issue here, you either too young, or you've got a future career as an Strategic-focused Manager in IT.
I think IBM's AS400 had only been out for a month or two when I spotted an advert outside a Manpower office:
AS400 Operator. Must have minimum of 4 years AS400 experience.
From Wiki, "The platform was first introduced as the AS/400 (Application System/400) on June 21, 1988"
Strictly speaking that's not impossible.
The ad is for a .NET developer with 10 years' experience - but it doesn't say "10 years' experience of .NET". So in 2003 somebody who had started work in IT in 1993 and had been working with .NET from the moment it was available would satisfy the criteria.
</pedant>
"Maybe I just don't understand how this whole cloud thing works, but the last two products we bought labeled "SAAS" required us to pull up 4 new on-prem servers."
That sounds akin to the MD in the early 1970s who asked the board for a computer and was turned down. He then asked for an accounting machine, and got the go ahead for that.
It turned out to be a computer.
FFS, it's not rocket science. Cloud 'introductory offers' will suck you in, then as you use it more and more, they lock you in. Getting out of those 'deals' is very difficult as the big players will entice companies with big discounts on longer agreements. The problem is, the more you use it, the more your costs go up, to a point where it's costing more than on premise, and as companies would have let their IT staff go and mothballed or sold server resource, they're then stuck.
The cloud will unravel eventually. There will be some ultra high profile hacks, whole infrastructures will go down, and companies wont be able to function.
In the past they developed from Desktop Support, then moved into in-house Server Support (such as your email, file&print, active directory), then they moved into assembly of the servers you ran to make money or run a service, where they learnt how to build, install, configure then support your server kit in your IT room.
Now the clown-car MBAs running the show think 'IT is just a Cloud - lets get someone else to do it'.
So, over time, this has led to the number of people entering the Server support profession decreasing, partly due to the lack of career path to get the experience, and partly the cost cutting by finance-spreadsheet-monkeys to say 'we don't need IT people, the Cloud does it all'.
So you have made your bed, now go fuck-off and enjoy your expensive Cloud - other peoples computers you have no control over, and can't find anyone to support for you.
It depends on whether you are referring to cloud providers or in-house IT support.
Cloud providers (as vendors) can be threatened by large customers to either fix their s[censored]t or customers will go elsewhere. With in-house servers, the support staff may be more difficult to deal with. In non-IT businesses, the IT department is often a dead end. And as such, it is a good place to hide idiot son-in-laws of executives. Good luck leaning on these people to clean up their act.
During my career (engineering), I had the opportunity to take over an IT function from some knuckle-draggers in the mainframe department. Runing a couple of Sun and HP systems was just a sideline to my engineering duties. Until IT woke up started defending its fiefdom.
As a developer, I'm not interested in being on call to fix other developers' garbage whenever it breaks, whether it's running in-house or in the cloud. I've had enough of that with full-stack websites. I like building things, dammit, not fighting trash fires.
With the proliferation of "Web 2.0" crap over the past decade, ordinary businesses gradually shifted from static content to interactive web/mobile apps backed by fragile 1st- and 3rd-party infrastructure services. Perhaps it's time for a strategic purge of unsupportable infrastructure.
"Cloud providers (as vendors) can be threatened by large customers to either fix their s[censored]t or customers will go elsewhere."
Threaten, yes; but to make good on that threat they need staff able to move the services and data elsewhere.
And they no longer have any.
IT in general is maturing, but vendor stock valuations are still at hyper-growth P/E ratios. In order to sustain this, they need to keep increasing revenue and convince ownership that the increases will be stable. So everything is being forced into subscription models whether it makes sense or not. There are some areas where *aaS will often make sense - startups, very small companies, and solopreneurs on one end, and mega-corporations that suffer from extreme bloat on the other. Most well-run organizations in the middle are better off considering applications and services on a case-by-case basis - and should beware of the many *aaS traps you can get locked into (many of them potentially fatal to a business).
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