The article linked at the bottom of this post can also be applied to other on premise equipment providing services, such as PBXs (phone systems), POS (Point of Sales Systems), etc.
We now avoid having to hire people to maintain hardware, prevent failure and allocate square footage to equipment to focus on increasing productivity by supporting other functions of our business.
Although this is great from a business management standpoint, all those people specializing in supporting on-premise equipment must now find other strategies and services offerings to earn a living.
In my past life as a technology design and support technician, on-premise servers and software is where I made a living. Hardware failure and software configuration is where most of my billable hours came from, but now with cloud computing I’m sure my focus would be finding new ways to supplement a demising income.
Learning everything there is about cloud computing and migration strategies to the cloud is where my career focus would have to move to in order to stay relevant in today’s world of technology support.
Good luck to all those on-premise support technicians in riding the next technology wave!
http://gigaom.com/2014/03/29/rip-the-server-its-time-to-breathe-the-air-of-cloud-connection/
-Alexander