Please don’t get me fired
A look into the impact of ‘cloud fear’ on career progression.
This is an interesting subject I have seen crop up over the past year though a recent discussion has lead me to think a little deeper on the subject.
Following a recent Microsoft conference, I met with a lead software developer of a business.
Him and his team are extremely keen to use Azure though there is a large amount of friction within the business on a professional and personal level from the company’s infrastructure team.
From his point of view the on-premise infrastructure is costing the business. It is losing them time, money and just making what should be simple operations complex and convoluted. They use Azure within the business to help with their software development work though this hasn’t been classed as THE way to do things, only an option which can be done in certain scenarios where the main method should be traditional and using their own ‘tin’.
The company’s decision-making process and hierarchy is flat, so it was raised in a morning meeting earlier this year which caused this issue to arise, in short, the infrastructure team are worried they will be made redundant.
This made me think firstly about the impact on the business not being able to resolve certain challenges and evolve though that isn’t what I want to cover.
With regards to the infrastructure team it becomes more complex, reason being they don’t realise they won’t be made redundant as they will still have an infrastructure to manage, just no/less physical assets.
This is a shift in their role from being 80% maintenance and 20% innovation to 80% innovation and 20% maintenance. This is interesting as this shift actually increases their business value meaning their job if anything is less redundant than before, at the end of the day you can always just outsource server maintenance if they aren’t adding business value. Whether or not they know this I am unsure, but trends show that 60% of all UK businesses will be utilising public cloud by 2020, this in turn limits their potential career growth and potentially only offers them 40% of new roles available on the market.
Don’t get me wrong where will always be a place for on-premise infrastructure but as the years go on I see that 60% climbing as more and more businesses move to a hybrid deployment and require people to manage cloud environments alongside them.
Unless they are full on troglodytes, they will be aware of cloud, but what surprises me is the reluctance to research and learn more about the subject itself, what that means for their current business but most of all what that means for their future in this company and perhaps the next as it is a key technology in their industry and its continuing to grow in relevance.
This is a fantastic opportunity to develop themselves, their experience and skill set as well as develop the company they work for but that’s what makes me scratch my head…
I get some companies need to be fully on-premise and I appreciate that but like this situation they don’t.
What effect will this have on a global scale over an extended period? Probably not much as new talent will come in and shake things up, but it makes me worry for some people’s future in this industry.
Like I always say, IT is Darwinian, you adapt or die.
Thoughts?
Experienced IT Manager | MIS & BI Expertise | Strategic IT Leader | Innovator
7 年I look at this from an SME perspective. Our solution was to move to a third party hosted private cloud, delivered as a fully managed service. At the time our small, but limited, IT team had left. The service provider, in the context of the fully managed service, delivers all of the skills we had and a lot more. They obviously have to employ skilled people to do that. Now an SME cannot afford to employ the people to deliver all of the necessary skills to fully maintain the systems, often taking the hit in downtime while the available people "work it out". The service provider has to deliver those skills to meet their SLAs, so must employ those people. As more and more companies , particularly SMEs, move into the cloud concept, and service providers grow, as I believe they will, there will be a greater need for skilled people, but in the larger service provider and not the end user.
Make better use of your information - Data management + development projects under your control - Database Consultant
7 年Hi Chris Allen. I think that the prospects for IT jobs (such as DBAs) in the types of business that you describe are getting tighter due to "the cloud", but not in the way that you address in this article. What is changing job prospects (for local staff) is not moving databases from on-site to self-managed databases on Azure (still managed by a DBA working for the local company), but replacing locally managed databases with turnkey solutions in the cloud. E.g. once upon a time, a CRM system would be a database held and managed locally. Now, CRM is a set of user accounts to access the website/app server of a turnkey solution provider. The solution provider does all the DBA work.
20+ years as a freelance SQL Server DBA Consultant. ?? Wherever the data lives: On-prem ?? / Azure & AWS ?? Making it Fast ??♀? Available ??? & Secure ?? Outside IR35 contracts only. ??
7 年Good article Chris, it has been stated for last ten years that the role of DBA is dead. With the sheer rise of cyber/data crime a DBA is a valuable asset against fighting that. Even if they are there to stop Windows people from installing SQL Server itself (click next, click next, click next ;done!) :o(