The hottest topic in IT at the moment is undoubtedly Cloud Computing. It received a lot of attention at last week’s vForum and is due to be one of the areas of focus at this week’s FST event. However, being a recruiter specialising in the IT Infrastructure space, I am very keen to find out how the move towards cloud computing could impact the size of IT departments and whether cloud arrangements with providers around the globe could mean a decrease in IT vacancies in Australia.

I have read a number of articles on this topic and opinion seems to be divided. In 2009, Richard Marcello, President of Technology, Consulting, and Integration Solutions at Unisys, speaking at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California, said that “We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization,”. Although this statement may be true, a number of industry writers and specialists have argued that although in-house IT jobs may decrease long-term, in the short-term the need for cloud computing specialists will increase numbers of staff required, and moving forward there will still be a requirement for IT staff in data centres, working for cloud providers and in-house managing the relationship between the two. In addition, other writers have said that although there have been advancements in technology in the past, this hasn’t led to mass redundancies and has often had the opposite effect.

What are your thoughts as an IT Professional? Is the emergence of this technology causing you to worry about your job security?

The topic of a mandatory ISP level internet filter, which forms part of Labor’s policies, has been hotly contested over the past few months and in the last few days the Green Party have come out to side with the Coalition and state that a PC-based approach would be more effective. Labor devised such a plan to target refused classification material that shouldn’t be available online such as child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act. This material is currently not available on Australian hosted websites however it can still be accessed on international websites and Labor plan to block these with an ISP web filter.

My question in this blog is this: Should we be against this? Is this being done purely for the safety of our homes and our children, or is this just censorship and a way to control what we see, think and do?

I personally believe that the aforementioned refused classification material should not be available on the internet. I would not want children or adults to view or be at all exposed to this,  however, I do feel that an ISP filter isn’t the best option to combat this, particularly with simple ways around a filter, such as adding a question mark to the end of the web address thereby changing the address enough to make it different, as recently documented by Gizmodo, and the sheer volume of websites out there meaning that a filter could never block them all. In my opinion, I think that both the Greens and the Coalition are right in suggesting PC-based filtering which can offer a much broader filter and can be personalized depending upon the household.

Despite my personal belief that this refused classification type of material shouldn’t be available, there is also a human-rights issue here and many would argue that it is one’s personal choice as to what they look at online. In addition, there are people out there that are worried that this is just a start to online censoring which may try to block further websites and activities such as torrents etc. With such a large percentage of the public against this style of filter it definitely seems that Australians don’t seem to think that it will be for their own good.

The National Broadband Network (NBN) is one of the hottest topics of discussion at the minute amongst MPs, Telecommunications companies, industry experts, and us the Australian taxpayers. On the 18th June the Senate Committee, tasked with investigating the Government’s NBN, called for a cost vs. benefit analysis of the project to be undertaken to determine whether it represented value for money for the public. In addition, many industry experts in the press have questioned the $17M of taxpayers’ money spent on the failed first tender, despite Communications Minister Stephen Conroy stating that this was “absolutely not” a waste of money.

These debates have been strongly contested by the opposing sides in the last year or so, however with the recent $11 billion deal between the Government and Telstra which a spokeswoman for the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, declared “… means the NBN can be built cheaper, quicker, with less unnecessary duplication, faster take-up of services and less overhead cabling,” it begs the question, have the Government turned the corner or is it still going to cost more money than it’s worth?

In a Sydney Morning Herald article on 7th May, 2010, an Optus spokeswoman was quoted as saying that “Today the average revenue per user is $110 for the combined line rental ($25), voice calls ($35) and internet ($50). Based on that and, on the estimated wholesale price, we expect people to be paying roughly the same.” This is in disagreement with Paul Budde, an independent telecommunications analyst, who said that “It will mean it will cost $30 to $35 to the wholesalers and $50 or $60 to retail for broadband and voice.” Also, despite the Government recently stating that the cost of the NBN will be considerably less than the $45M originally stated (down to around $26M now), Mike Quigley, NBN Co’s CEO could not conclusively say whether the project could be delivered at this budget and was quoted on the weekend as saying that “When it comes to cost you always have to ask at what point do you stop? It’s a very long-term project — money will be out into this network for years and years and years, as it is upgraded…We are developing our business case. We have not bedded down our figures”.

With these discrepancies in figures, the lack of a cost vs. benefit analysis of the project and the potential that the Network could be scrapped if the Opposition won power, is the NBN worth the money that is being spent on it?

What are your thoughts?