I don't know what it is, but I know what it isn't.
For some time there have been news stories such as this one that state that the big layoffs that the infotech world is now seeing would be because of the "move to the cloud" (the customer adopting a rental rather than an ownership model of IT assets). Baloney. Such stories accurately convey what they know of numbers of workers no longer employed, plus estimates of what's to come, and then proceed to prognosticate about the "why" of it all.
If they can, so can I.
I have some experience at a cloud provider which rented not only virtual but physical or co-located assets. Referring to that experience and totally off the cuff, I'll illustrate three categories of asset that give the customer any IT capability:
material assets
structural assets
maintenance assets
The material assets would be the physical hardware. The structural asset is whoever is architecting the nodes and networks together (which determines what to buy or rent). The maintenance assets would be those responsible for operation. The only one of these asset categories affected by "the cloud" (the question of renting or owning) is the first one, the material. We got lots of calls from customers that wanted help on the other two (either operating servers or re-architecting networks) but since we did not sell service, there was little we could do, although we did WHAT little we could for them (restarts, minor investigation). This is my point: they still badly needed help with the second and third asset categories. Some customers tried to get by with no administrator, simply calling a server maintenance company when the box was down and judging a full or part-time administrator to be too expensive. Sometimes we would be surprised to speak with an actual professional administrator and employee to the customer. But you see the situation: whether renting or owning the gear, a business must still get someone to set up the way the computers interact with the world and each other, and must still get someone to perform day-to-day operations; servers don't run themselves any more than cars decide where to drive.
That's why I said "Baloney" at the beginning of this post. "The cloud" is simply an ownership distinction. The only way a cloud situation cutback could affect human administrators would be in a Managed Hosting environment, where you rent not only stuff but people (a wildly expensive prospect). Most servers are rented in the Unmanaged manner (bring your own expertise).
So if the layoffs can't be explained by the change to a rental model, what's up? My guess (I made good grades in Economics) would be that it's the general level of economic activity in a particular country. This seems to be going on worldwide. Although the Information Systems Security Association says that general labor needs between now and 2020 will grow at least 7%, and that IT Security needs will double or triple that in the same period, we still in the short run see cutbacks. I think both observations are true. We do (pretty much) know that for the two Obama presidential terms, GDP has grown less than 3%, which is poor. I say that IT health is directly related to general business activity, since IT is only a delivery device for business activity. If companies are merging, selling out or otherwise closing, there is less immediate need for us, the IT employees. But that changes as business climate improves or degrades.
I don't have any clever math to prove this. Only the logic that since "the cloud" does not give an organization the ability to fire the IT staff, you have to look elsewhere for the layoff impetus. Maybe employee cost goes up because of insurance price hikes. Maybe a competitor is trouncing the company's main product. Maybe the directors of the outfit intended to sell out at this time anyway. Is there a lawsuit from the owners of a similar design? Whatever.
If the general business environment improves, whopee. We get more data so some Eco major can do a thesis. We'll see. But no, rented servers are not the 'mechanical man' supplanting real people.
