Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 164

It is especially telling that one of the major boosters of cloud comput-
ing, the Gartner Group, is also among those most insistently predicting
the demise of IT labor through the cloud. For Gartner, such a develop-
ment is positive because it means a signiicant reduction in labor costs for
the companies that employ its services. Speaking at a conference of IT
professionals, two Gartner analysts forecast that by 2020 demand for
IT staff to support cloud data centers will collapse. For them, “the long
run value proposition of IT is not to support the human workforce—it is
to replace it” (Dignan 2011b). The process will take many forms, but the
basic pattern will start with outsourcing computing to the cloud, which
will become an IT utility. Business processes will then be outsourced
to software, which will affect all economies, but it will hit developing
economies the hardest because nations like India now dominate the
outsourcing of high-tech jobs. As software takes over the jobs of high-
tech service workers, countries like India, which have employed millions
through outsourcing from the West, will suffer. Furthermore, cloud
companies will virtualize their data centers, leading to a decline in the
number of people required to maintain that infrastructure. Workers whose
jobs are connected to building and designing data centers will also suf-
fer as the need for physical infrastructure declines. Consequently, “many
IT workers will face hollowed out job prospects just like factory workers
did as the U.S. manufacturing base disappeared” (ibid.). The outcome
appears inevitable, according to the Gartner analysts and a tech expert
who describes their views. As IT utilities emerge and spread, workers will
disappear along with other physical assets. Gartner could not be clearer:
“CIOs believe that their data centers, servers, desktop and business appli-
cations are grossly ineficient and must be rationalized over the next ten
years. We believe that the people associated with these ineficient assets
will also be rationalized in signiicant numbers along the way. We foresee
a substantial reduction in the U.S. IT workforce, especially among those
supporting the data center and applications, in end-user organizations”
(ibid.). This forecast is already playing out among some of the major users
of cloud services, such as Europe's largest bank, HSBC, which in March
2013 announced a signiicant reduction of its IT workforce due to the
growing ability to outsource to the cloud. In the irst round of cuts, it
trimmed software stafing from 27,000 to 21,000 and planned further
cuts across all of its IT departments (Jenkins 2013). As if to add insult to