Report: Increased Spending Seeds New Cloud Jobs

A new study from IDC estimates that increased public and private sector spending on cloud computing, which is expected to grow exponentially in the next few years, could add almost 14 million jobs to the global economy by 2015. Just under 1.2 million of those cloud-generated jobs will go to Canada and the US, the report estimates, with approximately another 200,000 appearing in the UK. The bulk of the job adds, however, will be generated in the “BRIC” area: Brazil, Russia, India and China.

As reported on in SmartPlanet.com, the study also suggests that cloud computing will help organizations across the world increase revenues by $1.1 trillion a year. John Ganz, IDC’s Senior Vice President, sees those revenues arising from multiple sources: “Enterprises that embrace cloud computing reduce the amount of IT time and budget devoted to legacy systems and routine upgrades, which then increases the time and budget they have for more innovative projects.”

The study also concludes that majority of the expected cloud jobs will go to the BRIC area because of its countries’ available workforce size, growth potential and the easy availability of manufacturing resources. Those countries, despite perceptions in the West, have also been quite proactive when it comes to cloud adoption. “We tend to think of China and India as emerging markets,” Ganz says, “but they’re actually early adopters of the cloud. They’re not bound to existing systems. They’ve skipped that step, so there’s less holding them back.”