Reality and Fiction
I am always amazed at the die-hard IT folks. Change occurs... It is inevitable... Cloud Computing is actually nothing more than shared resources and shared datacenters. It provides small and medium sized companies with the ability to utilize software and hardware that would typically be outside their financial reach.
Jobs will change, again that is an inevitablity... Anyone that thinks that PCs and Laptops aren't headed toward the 'tossable' version needs to get their heads out of the... excuse the pun... clouds... At some point soon most devices that are 'wired' will be wireless and most wireless devices will be capable of running through city-wide wireless access, or company installed WIFI (which will be installed through a consultant). The user will connect to the company's website and download their approved apps, or an image of a virtual PC, and then will do their work. Yes this is really close to the model of Dumb Terminals from the late 80s and early 90s. This is going to happen... whether IT wants it to or not.
So the article is correct in that area. I have to agree that customized software development (specifically for integrating cross-cloud storage) will be necessary for companies.
Anyone that says that their datacenter is more secure than the cloud is - again - fooling themselves. If setup correctly the datacenter will have the funding to support much better security than the average small or medium size company can currently afford.
If I was to compare this to another historical event consider it like the small mom-an-pop stores. Like how those dissappeared; typical IT personnel will be swallowed by larger datacenter/cloud providers. Others will shift to project management roles, and others will become developers for utilizing these various massive datacenters and cloud software.
You are already seeing it because smaller companies that use cloud storage and applicaitons are much more flexible in their day-to-day operations, as such, they can change with the here-and-now when larger businesses cannot. So those that cannot compete will shift to the same model to stay alive and thus we will shift to cloud-type environements for companies.
