IT Desktop Support To Be Wiped Out Thanks To Cloud Computing 349
An anonymous reader writes "Tech industry experts are saying that desktop support jobs will be declining sharply thanks to cloud computing. Why is this happening? A large majority of companies and government agencies will rely on the cloud for more than half of their IT services by 2020, according to Gartner's 2011 CIO Agenda Survey."
What a bunch of useless buzzwords (Score:5, Informative)
Survey-vertisement (Score:5, Informative)
This isnt the first time they have done this, this wont be the last. I remember back in 2003 they basically came out with a survey that stated something along the lines of "by 2010 around 50% of all US IT jobs will be offshored...oh and apropos of nothing, we just HAPPEN to have an offshore IT consulting service. What a coincidence! Contact us now for a no-fee consultation, and remember, 50% of all jobs, you dont want to be left behind, call today!"
However their predictions werent even CLOSE to being true, I would be surprised if 10% of all IT jobs are now done offshore, still a large % to be sure, but nowhere near what Gartner was predicting. Of course, Gartner doesnt have a vested interest in being truthful, they have a vested interest in creating alarmist headlines to try to drum up business for their shitty consulting arm.
Re:Survey? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Anyone that knows anything... (Score:2, Informative)
It's obvious that you don't really know either what is meant by "the cloud" or much about it... The cloud is a term which I don't really like much as it lets a lot of IT Managers abstract things that they know nothing about and then sound like they are experts, however the concepts behind the term work well.
Take your obsession of hanging on to desktops for local files and some strange notion that you need to "custom" design something for the cloud.
Even here in local government we are working now toward introducing a virtual desktop infrastructure where users will use dumb terminals either to sign on to a virtual machine or to a virtual desktop. In management lingo it's a "cloud" service, in reality it's racks of servers with virtual machines running on them, to the user there's no difference between this and a full local machine (unless the network goes down, in which case these days they'd have difficulty anyway). The user will get their own desktop, their own storage that to them appears to be local but the cost of the kit on the desk becomes so little you can litterally throw away the old kit when it fails and slap a new box in. On top of that the users "local" files now follow them from machine to machine and they can access their own machine remotely very easily. It also means that all support for the OS and applications can easily be handled from the datacentre... the list goes on.
The idea that the world stops if the network goes down as a reason to not get this kind of set-up for any *large* organisation is nonsense. If you are a fairly large organisation the likelyhood is that your world stops if the network goes down in any case, no access to email, no access to hosted applications... the list goes on.
Re:Survey? (Score:5, Informative)
This was one of the early arguments for Unix/Linux.
Windows because it offers the possibility of a rich client has: complex breakable hardware, which is unique to the user, a complex OS and applications susceptible to malware. A thin client erases all those issues. The hardware itself is far less breakable, and isn't unique to the user. You can just have spares and have them fixed "whenever". The OS just has to boot the hardware and connect to the servers, and the applications all exist remotely. Think about your television as the hardware, the cable box as the OS and the shows as being applications. The TV rarely breaks and when it does it can replaced with another generic television.
Now .... you are replacing your desktop team with a more complex system admin and operations team because the local system But right now, as a legacy of Windows, most companies have both complex server solutions and complex desktop solutions.