The New Age Old Question, Will the Cloud Replace IT Workers?

 This is one of the more controversial topics. As businesses look more towards the cloud to get rid of aging IT infrastructure, what happens to the workers who used to manage this infrastructure? As shown in the graphic below, company budgets for cloud services are increasing each year:

Now my personal opinion, I don't think us IT professionals will feel too much of a difference over the next 5-10 years. What I see happening is that we're no longer dealing with the heartaches of installing and racking physical hardware. Which can literally take hours per device depending on what you're needing to install. More lower skilled jobs such as rack & stacking may shrink but even the Amazon and Googles of the world still needs to install hardware in their data centers for their software.

I see cloud as a great opportunity for just about everyone in the IT field, rather you're on the database team, helpdesk,  or  network engineer. What cloud is doing is making your job more efficient, to focus on higher up tasks. Instead of me spending 3 days spinning up switches, VLAN's, etc.; this time used for more important duties such as design and documentation. No longer do you need to deal with a late night emergency change to increasing bandwidth to a SQL server for the DB team. Spend a few hours scripting your cloud environment to scale the database infrastructure and un-scale as needed. That's it, you're done, hand over the keys to the database manager!

Even as we start to automate server and network provisioning, rather in the cloud or on-premise; we still need techies to manage this. Jumping ahead of the game and learning how powerful and affordable these new tools are will set you a part for the years to come. How much longer can IT folk hide in their cubicles manually change Guest Wireless passwords or downloading and installing OVA's on VM hosts? I bet at least half of the tasks we do everyday could be eliminated or at the very least automated. It's up to us to keep pushing technology forward to make our day jobs easier and not being scared on loosing touch of the tech past.

Do you agree, disagree, not sure? Comment below, I would love to hear from my fellow IT folk and continue the discussion!