The experts reckoned that the likely development was for smaller, specialist providers of cloud services to emerge that would either aggregate and combine existing services, or provide a specific implementation themselves to meet the needs of specific sectors, industries or regulatory frameworks. So if you need a certain security standard, an ITIL-compliant framework or even just to keep your data in (or as far as possible from) a certain country, then you would go to companies smaller than the Amazon’s of this world to get the individual attention needed.
So the cloud horizon of the future is likely to be made up of the web-scale providers who will continue to provide platform as a service (PaaS) type offerings for the lowest price possible, with a fairly standardised bundle of capabilities and with which you are on your own to do as you will. Beneath them, in terms of scale at least, will be the specialist provides — who let’s face it could still be pretty big — who can ensure data residency, security certifications, frameworks and other special needs. Below that again, would be even smaller players who will offer office all-in-a-box type services for even smaller businesses who want the maximum amount of capability delivered as a service. And then parallel and outside of all this will be those companies who have the scale and resources to do it all for themselves, but with a private cloud architecture that would be capable of hybrid cloud operation when necessary.
If this is the case, there are major implications for the way that companies will use and leverage technologies in the future, not least of which will be the skills issue. Most mid-sized companies, particularly here in Ireland, will likely employ IT service delivery mangers instead of network and systems administrators, DBAs and other specialist technical people who previously led teams of skilled technicians. The service managers will have the business understanding of their previous technical counterparts, but will rely on a service provider for the actual delivery. As there are already predictions that that the grandchildren of today’s thirty-somethings may never learn to drive due to the advent of self-driving cars, it may well be the case that a whole host of current IT skills will go that way too as the software-defined trend, combined with new usage patterns of IT mean that companies simply do not need such skillsets anymore and the huge service providers implement automation systems in massive, multi-tenant environments.
Welcome to the future.
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