Question for 21st Century: Is role of IT Administrator becoming obsolete

Question

Hi,

This time I have a more general question and I'd like to pick your brain on this one: Is role of IT Administrator becoming obsolete in 21 Century? People were studying to become and IT ADMIN since windows 2000. Then in 2016 we see a shift to more hybrid (on premise connected to azure) deployment and technologies that push you out of standard server management. Now we still have Windows Server 2019 but...it looks like automation and cloud wanna take all the jobs out of people's hands. Is 2019 the last version of Windows Server as we know it. I see they wanna push everything out to the cloud but how many folks would like to have all their private data managed by Microsoft only? If all will go through cloud, there is a huge potential of hack and misusing the data. Once it starts to happen will they come back to hybrid deployments? So if you studied and worked in "traditional" windows server for eons, does it mean everybody now must shift to cloud and automation? What is the role of IT Admin (on premises ) now ? You go to the shop now the machine is doing stuff for you , you just need a folk to maintain it .Thank you for answers and insight...And what the opportunities out there(jobs) ?

Answer 1

Hello @InfoTechdude

The traditional IT architecture of enterprises has more hardware equipment, requires a large number of technicians to run, maintain, and deal with the threat of network security, this requires a high level of technical expertise operations team. Even so, sometimes operations teams can be overwhelmed by sudden cyberattacks.

Cloud service providers not only have a more professional and higher level of operational and maintenance technology capabilities, but also stronger network security capabilities. Businesses use cloud servers without worrying about technical and security capabilities, and without having to build large, high-level operations teams to save on labor costs.

From my point of view, cloud servers replacing traditional physical servers has become a trend, coupled with virtualization technology, the further development of network security technology, cloud servers will provide the business community with higher performance, more secure IT infrastructure services.

There are a large number of technical jobs, cloud computing engineers, cloud computing operations engineers, cloud network security engineers, cloud architects, cloud computing software engineers, cloud service development engineers, cloud system administrators, cloud network operations engineers, cloud computing consultants, cloud product managers, the industry itself has a future, then any position in the industry will not be bad. So to engage in which position is the most promising is not the most important, it is important to learn through their own and improve how to be competent for one of the posts, down-to-earth to do a good job in a position.

Best Regards
Karlie

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Answer 2

@Anonymous Hi, Thank you for the long answer. What will happen if this cloud infrastructure get hacked? Can anyone imagine the impact? It's just a matter of time. So according to your post, every "regular" IT admin should upgrade and go find a job in the cloud? I bet (I don't have stats) there are so many companies who will use on prem Servers no matter what. The problem is what to do with knowledge you have already obtained?. Cloud is a simplistic-in-comparison technology- click, click, click here you go...(like PC to mobile skill downgrade or even calculator (calc admin ;D ))Azure still operates physical servers to keep all the things going. Do they hire there too? They must have local admins, hardware and stuff to operate such vast operation like Azure cloud?

Answer 3

I don't think that "admin" means "Windows Server Administrator", it means "administrative person in IT" and therefore they are needed a lot. Not every "user" wants to get into all technical details and administrative possibilities.

And to be clear about the business: no fancy "Cloud Consultant" knows everything,. We will always need an end device somehow, maybe even a managed / standard one, infrastructure, and so on. "High Level Consultants" aren't in touch with basics and not every company consists of tech professionals.

Admin's in any way will always be needed, it's a great job opprtunity, just think of your favorite field - or invent it yourself :-P