The Cloud Isn't Shrinking IT Departments Yet

Shrinking the IT department and cutting down on costs are two commonly touted benefits of cloud computing. We’ve reported before about estimates of how many IT jobs would be eliminated by cloud computing. But so far, we’re not seeing that happen. Instead, firms are hiring more IT staff and paying them more.

In a recent column for The Register Matt Asay, former Canonical COO and current VP of business development at Strobe, asks why that is.

Asay cites recent data from Forrester and North Bridge that indicate that shrinking IT and reducing costs are important factors in cloud adoption. But he also looks at recent employment data (which we’ve covered here before) and notes that IT hiring and salaries are both up. We’ve mentioned before that IT jobs are coming back to the U.S. from abroad, but Asay notes that outsourcing is actually continuing. Which means that IT staffing is actually increasing quite a bit, both in-house and outsourced.

Asay concludes that the cloud is changing, but not shrinking IT departments. “This is why the areas of most potent salary growth are not necessarily in traditional IT jobs,” Asay writes. “Data modelers, web designers, and others who shape technology to drive a company’s business, and not merely maintain its customer relationship management system or servers, are seeing the most salary growth.”

However, at least according to staffing firm Modis, many traditional IT positions (such as system administrators, network administrators and systems analysts) are the fastest growing.