Even though the I.T. industry has sunk its claws deep into the modern business world, it too faces a threat from an emerging service. Cloud computing is rising more rapidly than any other service in the past. There are both seen and unseen threats building up the competition between cloud services and I.T. Some challenges that cloud computing has brought to the industry relate to its services while others relate to I.T. professionals.

Considering the vast size of the I.T. industry, it is difficult to overturn its foundations from the core, but based on the sudden boom of cloud services in such a short period of time, it is predicted that big changes will occur in the near future. It is foreseen that it could take a decade for cloud services to rule over I.T. if the progression is constant, however not all opinions on this matter are unanimous, resulting in a serious debate regarding this prediction.

Cloud Services as Compared to IT Services

Cloud services are non-strategic in contrast to I.T. services. The cloud handles emails and all the related processes as well as company website hosting, whereas I.T. is needed for more specific work like handling the infrastructure and software services. As such, larger companies are unlikely to shift their data centers to a cloud as they don’t want to rely upon virtualization to handle their sensitive information, but they might opt for I.T. services to improve the overall functioning and management of their business processes.

Challenges Posed to IT Pros

From utility computing and automation to hosted applications and database management, everything is controlled and managed by I.T. professionals. However, with the advent of cloud computing, they are facing a very serious challenge: how to integrate the cloud into existing systems while also safeguarding company data. They need to transform their services while maintaining their integrity and reliability as managers of these sensitive tasks.

IT Jobs at Risk

Since the cloud offers pretty much everything on a virtual storage system that I.T. professionals work to establish within internal company systems, the demand for I.T. experts – like database administrators, network managers, and server administrators – has reduced drastically with the need for more virtualization experts. There doesn’t appear to be the same need for these professionals as there had been in the past.

While it’s true that many I.T. professionals have been worrying about the downfall of jobs, others are suggesting that shifting to cloud service providers would be far more economical for them. All things considered, it is just another part of the job description; more skills to develop in order to meet the growing challenges.

Cloud computing is fast becoming an influential factor for the I.T. industry. For professionals, it is as important to know about virtualization as it is to know about technicalities. Experts on the subject have suggested that cloud computing is expected to create new jobs, and the reason for that is most new applications use cloud computing. The back end work can be handled by cloud providers but there is still a lot to know about the infrastructure that organizations or companies likely wouldn’t be managing themselves.

I.T. services have faced many updates since its boom. Will cloud computing bring about its downfall? On the contrary; it is one such advancement which is expected to benefit the sector while promoting growth through competition for the top spot as a leading industry.