Will a Shift to Cloud Computing Create or Cut Jobs?

I don’t often look to movies about beer for poignant macroeconomic commentary, but as February ended with an 8.1 percent unemployment rate (and rising), a line from “Strange Brew” struck me as particularly relevant. As they’re introduced to their new jobs as the only two workers on the bottling line, the Mackenzie brothers are told: “Welcome to 1984, the age of automation and unemployment. The rise of the machine and the fall of man. The end of the human era.”

Will cloud computing, as some predict, be to information technology today what automation was to the assembly line in the ’80s? If so, what happens to those jobs? To the people who used to do them?

The impact on the bottom line is impossible to deny. Cutting IT costs while maintaining, or even improving, performance levels saves jobs in other departments and might even help keep the company afloat. When done right, the savings realized from server consolidation are well documented, and they only improve when cloud-like levels of virtualization, automation and outsourcing come into play. The cold, hard truth is virtualization and cloud computing let IT departments do a lot more with a lot less.

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