Cloud Computing to Create Millions of New Jobs; India, China to Lead the Cloud Driven Employment Boost: IDC Report

Millions of new jobs are coming up in the next few years in both IT and non-IT industries as companies begin their migration to the cloud and start redeploying funds that are now being used in the maintenance of in-house systems.

This report was presented in a paper by IDC, a global advisory firm and tech research company. The report states that before 2016, the companies’ shift to private and public cloud services will be creating nearly 14 million new jobs.

One of the surprises of this report is that approximately half of these jobs - about 6.75 million will be created in India and China, while 1.2 million jobs will be created in North America. This is because India and China are leapfrogging to Cloud Computing; the business in those countries, specially the SMB sector never had sufficient funds to invest in dedicated IT infrastructure adequate to serve their needs. This sector - consisting of small and mid-sized businesses is the growth engine for Cloud Computing led job growth, because they are moving more quickly towards the cloud than large companies, who have already invested hugely in their current in-house infrastructure. In addition, the smaller businesses are more numerous than the large ones.

Some of the industries in which the IDC expects the largest number of new jobs to crop up are media and communications, discrete manufacturing, and banking. IDC noted that communications, media, and banking may have been slow in their adoption of cloud computing, but they are still expected to generate at least a million new jobs each by 2016 because these industries are large segments and tend to invest heavily on IT.

The IDC research, which was underwritten by Microsoft, states that even today, the way that IT delivers economic value to businesses, industries, cities, and countries has already started to change “because cloud computing comes with unique economic leverage that means a little money spent up front leads to impressive returns down the line.”

Answering questions as to whether this migration to the cloud will, in fact, kill off IT jobs, the authors of the report assure that this is not a likely result. Instead, they say, the migration to cloud computing should be seen “as a way to free up existing resources to work on more innovative projects.”