The Coming Cloud Era Not Good for Everyone

The once-cocky geeks of IP now know what it was like for the craft workers of the telephone industry when they waltzed into switching control centers and order centers around the world, hip-checked the techs out of their three-wheeled seats and took over.

Not to compare the two, but it must have been what the Neanderthals felt when Homo Sapiens waltzed into Europe with their fancy tools and bigger brains. Uh oh.

Now that switching has been replaced by routing and “servord" by Web portals, and the behinds of the grunge crowd have spread to fit snugly into the comm-tech’s old chairs after 15 or 20 years of changing the game, they appear to be the ones looking up at the downturned noses of the next superior being. For it appears that not all have adapted to this latest evolution called the cloud. Virtualization is as strange to them as TCP/IP was to their predecessors.

A 2011 State of the Cloud Survey by Symantec suggests that IT organizations may not be adequately prepared for the move to the cloud, as almost half said their staffs aren’t ready to do it. It is my own interpretation that at least some of this hesitancy is not merely a concern about security or about maintaining control, but an incomplete understanding of how a cloud works. I have spoken with operations folks – the new age ones who are IP literate – who feel they are being pulled along by technology elites who have not explained themselves well. They are unsure about the effects on their operations and on their jobs. That sounds very familiar.

The survey does say that 87 percent of respondents expect that moving to the cloud will either make their information safer or, at the least, have no negative impact on security. However, half are not “ready" to make the move. That doesn’t mean they have other priorities or they want to fully monetize the systems they have before making changes or that their migration plans aren’t finished. It means they are not ready because (through no fault of their own) they feel too inexperienced with cloud concepts. That was their top concern. Just one in four IT teams has any cloud experience.

Over the last 25 years or so, service providers have lost their patience for training and re-training their technical staff. That leaves them with a couple of options: Hire new people and either layoff or relegate current staff to maintain the fading technologies, or outsource. Either way, welcome to 1990.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.