At the risk of stating the obvious, we're witnessing a serious shift in the way businesses use their IT, and it's something we all should take notice of. Gone are the days when squeaky guys like me hid in back rooms full of loud servers staring at logs and typing commands all day. Gone are the days when an IT department was tasked with total control of every aspect of the technology platform used by a given small or medium-sized business. Welcome to the future.

Attention IT professionals: you can't have total control anymore.

I know it's a scary idea for most of us in the field. We've spent our lives being the ones in control, the ones who could make anything happen, log into any account, reset any password, move any mailbox, rip the cover off of any server, fix any problem. But those days are over. We need to adapt, or we're going to become obsolete.

I know I'm talking obscurely this morning - not enough specifics and too much generality - but I've run into two situations with two different clients in the past 24 hours, and in both cases the problem was, when you boil it all down, that it made sense for the business to migration one or more services to a hosted service provider (to the cloud), and this decision made NO SENSE to the IT Department at the company, because they couldn't get a handle on the idea that they wouldn't have control anymore.

I know we IT professionals think we're demigods, and we think we know best. Most of the time, most of us make pretty good decisions about technology. But we're missing the boat if we aren't pushing for more cloud migration.

The times, they are a-changin’.

Let’s take a single example. E-mail services. There used to be a litany of really good reasons why businesses as small as 10 or 15 people had Exchange servers in their closets. There aren’t any good reasons left.

Security?
Bah. I’ve spent some time looking at the configuration at Rackspace (a big player in the hosted Exchange game) and at Smarsh (a big player in the compliance aspect of hosted Exchange), and I’ve got to tell you, they’re taking it more seriously than any Exchange administrator I know. They’re enforcing rules and watching traffic in a way that’s only possible on a large scale. No one guy is ever going to be as good as the team of IT Pros who are providing care for your hosted Exchange services at one of the big players in the hosted Exchange arena.

Functionality?
Nope. It used to be there were some details in Exchange that just didn’t work across the internet the way they work across your local network. Calendar sharing, proxy, public folders. Not anymore. You’d be hard-pressed to find a reputable hosted Exchange service provider who didn’t pre-configure all of that functionality in their hosted environment. And a hosted environment lets businesses take advantage of a long list of things that would be cost-prohibitive for your average 20-person firm (BlackBerry Enterprise, for instance; or live mail archiving).

Disagree if you want to, but disagree at your peril.

The corporate server rooms of the past look very different from the server rooms in your future. If you’re an IT professional, it’s time for you to take a good look at yourself in the mirror and figure out what your role is. Your role is changing, and if you want control, now’s the time to exert that control. Now’s the time to change your role.

Don’t misunderstand me. Your job’s not going away. But our role in IT is shifting. You’re not going to be the wizard behind the curtain anymore. You’re going to be the guy who strings it all together and keeps it all working. Give up some control of those servers in the closet, and you’ll get control of something bigger – the IT vision and future of your firm.