With more and more companies moving to the Cloud for more IT needs, the IT manager’s job is quickly evolving. The IT manager now needs to manage the cloud configuration and deployment and this can be every bit as challenging as managing an internal network. Their job function is not necessarily going away but changing. Less about hardware, more about configuration management.
For software companies like Visibility, we provide cloud hosting as well as cloud management as part of our offering. So we remove the burden of cloud infrastructure management from our customers. This task can be a big one. Database servers, application servers, block storage backup units, gigabytes of memory and terabytes of disk space all come into play. Load balancing, backup routines, server monitoring, etc, all are now managed remotely on tier one data centers’ machines and virtual machines.
The data center provides the physical box and a per hour rental of all hardware involved, as well as usage charges. The data center covers power redundancy and comes with uptime guarantees. But it is up to the server manager, often an IT person, to keep track of it all and ensure the environments are all working efficiently.
The Cloud isolates and manages hardware and connectivity issues, but the software, operating systems, backup routines, configurations, and databases all still need management remotely, typically by an IT staff. The Cloud offers unprecedented control over things and instant access to upgraded hardware. But it does not remove the need for a skilled IT person.
So the IT Manager’s job is not going away any time soon. Instead it is evolving and becoming one that takes advantage of his software management skills while removing the burden of hardware management.
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