Just days after Microsoft suffered a hugely embarrassing cloud computing outage, the company has released results of a survey that says spending on public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide over the next few years.
The study, carried out by Microsoft in conjunction with IDC, also claims that IT innovation created by cloud computing could generate $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenue.
The mammoth job creation will be divided pretty evenly between SMBs of fewer than 500 employees and larger enterprises, with the smaller companies just edging it.
Microsoft says this could be because smaller firms are less "computerised" than larger businesses so are not held back by legacy systems that may prove complicated to integrate with cloud services.
The report added that "capital constraints" will make cloud adoption, particularly public cloud, more appealing to smaller businesses.
In terms of regions it is unsurprising that it is China and India that will drive most of the new jobs, accounting for 6.75 million of the 14 million new jobs. The rest of the Asia/Pacific region accounts for a further 2.87 million new jobs.
As with smaller businesses, companies in this region will not suffer from "legacy drag" as they are emerging markets and do not have years of IT infrastructure in place already. Primarily though, it is the "immense" workforce in the region at will spur the job creation there, the report claims.
"We tend to think of China and India as emerging markets, but they’re actually early adopters of the cloud, said John Gantz, senior vice president at IDC and author of the white paper. "They’re not bound to existing systems. They’ve skipped that step, so there’s less holding them back."
North America will add 1.17 million cloud jobs and EMEA will see 2.07 million cloud jobs created by the end of 2015, the report added.
"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," Gantz says. "When IT innovation happens, business innovation is reached, which then supports job creation."
But how did IDC and Microsoft come up with the figure of 14 million new jobs by 2015? "The basic rationale for job growth is that IT innovation allows for business innovation, which leads to business revenue, which leads to job creation," the report says.
Going into more detail about how it arrived at the figure, the report adds: "To create a model that analyses the role of cloud in job creation, IDC calculated the number of cloud-generated jobs by weighing several factors, including available country workforce, unemployment rates, GDP, IT spend by industry and company size, industry mix by country and city, technology infrastructure by country and city, regulatory environment, and other factors."
This innovation that will drive the need for new jobs is also what could help cloud computing to generate increased revenue of $1.1 trillion across the countries studied for this research.
Last week Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform crashed, possibly as a result of the leap year. Websites such as the government’s new CloudStore were brought down by the outage.
