Cloud Computing

noel123ie

Hi all

A sys admin friend works for a large multinational who are outsourcing alot of work to India

He reckons alot of IT jobs will be gone due to this cloud computing where most storage etc will be done at large datacentre which will result in alot of IT jobs going as no sys admins etc

IT will be like a commodity gas water etc

Any opinions?
Noel

Tom Dunne

noel123ie wrote: »

IT will be like a commodity gas water etc

Any opinions?
Noel

IT already is a commodity.

However, there are a number of factors that mitigate against sending such work to the likes of India:

• the number of small/medium sized companies in Ireland that would not have a large IT infrastructure
• the need to have someone come onsite at short notice
• the whole legal/data protection angle - storing Irish data offsite, etc.

For the likes of longer term development projects, it may be more cost-effective to have them developed in far away lands, but when it comes to the day-to-day running of the IT infrastructure of a small Irish company, I can't see where the cost benefit would be.

(Yes, I work in the IT industry)

CorkFenian

Tom Dunne wrote: »

IT already is a commodity.

However, there are a number of factors that mitigate against sending such work to the likes of India:

• the number of small/medium sized companies in Ireland that would not have a large IT infrastructure
• the need to have someone come onsite at short notice
• the whole legal/data protection angle - storing Irish data offsite, etc.

For the likes of longer term development projects, it may be more cost-effective to have them developed in far away lands, but when it comes to the day-to-day running of the IT infrastructure of a small Irish company, I can't see where the cost benefit would be.

(Yes, I work in the IT industry)

Very good post..They have also found out across the board for development,engineering, and even with helpdesk IT.That the savings projected never materialised as well as large unforseen problems with quality.As the people in charge of transfer are generally moneymen without much strong consultation from their technical staff.

mickoneill30

Tom Dunne wrote: »

but when it comes to the day-to-day running of the IT infrastructure of a small Irish company, I can't see where the cost benefit would be.

And large companies. I've worked for several large companies. Storage is cheap (realitivly speaking). A large company is going to have a server room. Why would I host a few TB in India when I can host it in our server room, have it easily accesible for backup and restore for a couple of grand. And I've no need to worry about dealing with a third party company or worry about connectivity going down.

As for hosting applictions remotely I can't see the benefit for any company that already has an IT dept.

Cloud computing is here to stay but it's only going to slot in with current infrastructure. Some companies may move stuff to India but it'll be like the IT moves to India a few years ago. It's not going to save the millions that "some" people think it will and it will end up costing some companies more than they save.

mickoneill30

CorkFenian wrote: »

As the people in charge of transfer are generally moneymen without much strong consultation from their technical staff.

Doesn't that happen more and more these days. Then they look at IT when it goes belly up to either fix it or blame them. I'm kind of sick of that.

CorkFenian

mickoneill30 wrote: »

Doesn't that happen more and more these days. Then they look at IT when it goes belly up to either fix it or blame them. I'm kind of sick of that.

Was in a place a few years ago..With a lot of (relatively anyway) old servers\infrastructure..We proposed a plan to the IT Manager\Accountant.With a VMWARE proposal.Would have cost more in the short term than their proposal of "upgrading" comms room with 3rd party contracts etc..But in the medium long term..Would have made life so much easier for them...The figures differed by 5-6 is (around that) grand..Proposal failed..Now I'm a realist and understand that there are budgets and that IT will always be seen as an expense by business managers..(The good ones dont always see it that way IMO)..But they didnt listen to our advice and even got a 2nd opinion from a consultant.Who told them the same thing...
The kicker was free training with VMWARE was offered to support staff with the deal..I was gutted when they knocked it back...

harney

I think that Cloud Computing can only get bigger as time goes on. If you have a look at something like google apps for a small business it could look quite appealing to a startup company. Pay google a fee and they give you a 25GB per user email account, as well as on-line document storage and collaboration. No need for purchasing, or worse still pirating, MS Office. Security will be an issue, but I don't know enough to say how much.

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

The prices do not seem astronomical - $50 per user per year for email and the same for document collaboration, with the off-line tools coming out you can even afford to have you network connection go down and continue working.

The "only" issue is how well to you trust your data to be kept safe.
Personally I wouldn't store any thing sensitive on google docs, but then again I have been using gmail as my personal mail for years.

For those that say companies will never store confidential information on-line there is one company that seems to be defying this logic - salesforce.com

http://www.salesforce.com/customers/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce.com

It is hard to imagine a few years ago, at least for me, that you would pay someone to host both you and your competitions sales data in an off-site facility that you don't control.

I was at a talk recently on this and one option people were talking about was shared clouds. Non-competing groups coming together and paying for a shared semi-private clouds.

JimmyCrackCorn!

CorkFenian wrote: »

Very good post..They have also found out across the board for development,engineering, and even with helpdesk IT.That the savings projected never materialised as well as large unforseen problems with quality.As the people in charge of transfer are generally moneymen without much strong consultation from their technical staff.

That was my experience with outsourcing work.
Communication and quality were the big issues and this was not down to time difference. Though i will say it was incredibly frustrating.

mark renton

We used to have a saying in college, "what happens in the cloud stays in the cloud"

does this now mean I will have to learn what goes on in said cloud??

Ginger

ASP (Application Service Provider) has been around for ages. Commonly used for stuff that you dont want to host yourself or cant due to licencing costs/lack of experience eg SharePoint, Exchange, BizTalk etc.. Even your basic hosting provider has been doing this for a while (who hosts only their own 24/7 web app?? unless they are doing a lot more, it doesnt make financial sense unless you are dealing in scales of economy)

Also now you have Azure and Live Mesh which from a developer is pretty cool. Add to the mix SQL Data Services, .NET Services, Live Services SharePoint Services and other cloud services, you will start moving towards a fully hosted solution versus onsite. Add geo replication and you can start to see where this going

After having watched provisioning on Azure, I liked it. When you need more boxes to handle your traffic for your app, its a case of "how many" ok.. there you go all set up within a couple of mins. Deployment still takes a bit but its easy once you get there

Live mesh means development for client, web, and devices becomes a whole lot easier when you leave all the stuff to the cloud.

mark renton

:rolleyes:

yep - tutor was right

JimmyCrackCorn!

john47832 wrote: »

We used to have a saying in college, "what happens in the cloud stays in the cloud"

does this now mean I will have to learn what goes on in said cloud??

I suggest be aware of the double meaning of "the cloud"
Beware of buzz words.

Business/Marketing people and IT/Developers use it in very different ways that can make it mean very different things.

NullZer0

How dya like these apples : http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16402