I was reading an article that pcernie pointed to in the News forum, and clicked on the unrelated video at the bottom about Private Cloud computing. clicky

The idea seems very slick, but wouldn't wholesale take-up of this result in a large reduction in IT jobs? If a firm can turn it's needs up or down as required, like the use of a utility service, are they likely to need as much in house IT support?

I don't work in the industry, it just struck me as a dark cloud on the horizon (no pun intended).

Private clouds are held internally on the companies servers, so they still need staff to administer them. If they go for external cloud services, somebody is still needed to configure the clients, set up the access rights etc. on the cloud service. That won't change anything, in general terms of admin and support.

Depending on what you can and will outsource, you might need fewer on-site support staff. On the other hand, the cloud is so problematic, both in service reliability and legality at the moment, that most companies are reticent about using an external cloud company.

For example, it is illegal to store personal information (E.g. employee, contacts, creditor and debitor information) cannot be stored outside of the EU, if the company is based in, or collected the data from EU citizens. As most cloud services are either American or global and either the server are based in America or they are distributed around the world, they cannot guarantee that the data remains within the EU. That leaves the client (the person using the cloud service) open to prosecution - the cloud service isn't liable, as the client is responsible for ensuring that the data is stored legally.

Just in terms of general perception, it all sounded much better before Sony got it's back door kicked in, didn't it?

I don't think that Amazon's cloud outage in April helped the perceived security of cloud computing in general. Seriously - if a big boy like that can mess up, then who would trust their business to a smaller player..?

	Quote: Amazon's Cloudpocalypse brings the concept of the cloud crashing back down to earth.

Amazon's outage was only one node and only affected cheap-skate customers who didn't pay the extra to have redundancy on other nodes...

It still caused problems for some very famous customers. Company directors tend not to care about the subtleties; they just know that Reddit and Foursquare went down because "the cloud" isn't reliable...