@Jason You mean an old dog will not be willing to learn new tricks? That's a possibility. I was under the impression, though, that they seek out the recent grads because they have lower salary requirements. Experienced IT professionals will expect to earn no less than $60K, and many command six figues salaries. But someone just out of college may be willing to work for $40K, sometimes even for less.

Strong points. I think that's why we see a trend of "just out of college" IT people landing more jobs than seasoned IT professionals. Change is not something old school IT pro's are used to, but in this modern age, change is around every corner so it's a case of either dealing with it or moving on.

Mitch, good point. That is one of the perks of the cloud, clearly. Shifting those responsibilites lightens the load of the IT team, but that too can be a dangerous thing.

I think that it depends on where you are with your career in IT. If you are young or new to a company, these things would seem like temendous opportunities. If you have been somewhere for a while or are close to retirement, you might think about these changes as burdensome because things appear to be accelerating more rapidly than ever. I personally embrace the change, but it's clear that not everyone is going to agree with that statement. 

I hold that a security officer is vastly more suited to making these decisions than a system adimin woulld ever be

Jason Adams - It's a trade-off. You acquire all that infrastructure but you control it. When you go to the cloud, you give up control, but you also let someone else shoulder the responsibility. 

I agree, more control is indeed needed. The cloud present's ups and downs, but at the end of the day, there still needs to be staff that maintains the needs of the company in the IT area and those who manage the cloud. But, that's where outsourcing comes in, usually and unfortunately.

From a business standpoint, I truly understand where Cloud computing makes sense. When you purchase and maintain your own infrastructure, you obviously incur a high amount of cost up front between hardware, software and labor yet when you shift to the cloud, you're merely paying for what you need as you need it. It's bad for internal IT staff because it nearly renders them useless, hence a lot of unemployed IT folk's out there, but great for the business in terms of dollars. It's unfortunately there's always that drawback to something good.

Yes, the cloud is shifting the world from one in which businesses buy and then maintain their own computing capacity to one in which they simply pay for additional capacity as needed.  I have seen in the case of outsourcing where companies will outsource their infrastructure/applications/DBAs/etc... and the outsourcer would assume x number of people as part of the agreement.  I wonder if some of the cloud service providers are doing the same thing in some cases.

Exactly but there should not be a huge gap between the two. True less administration is the trend but definitely there should be some sort of a control is needed.