IT departments predicted to become extinct within five years
Hosted applications and virtual desktops will make IT departments at many organisations redundant within the next five years, according to a web application firm.
By 2013, Software as a Service (SaaS) firm Nasstar predicts that all major business applications will be fully hosted and that office workers will
access all of their programs online from their own desktop.
Charles Black, chief executive of Nasstar, said that this could bring about the end of traditional, on-site IT departments and support staff.
"IT has become a utility. And in the same way companies don't have a chief electricity officer to help people plug in and power their devices, so the costly overhead of IT management will be
replaced by a simple plug-and-play approach over the internet," he said.
"Traditionally, enterprises have the cost and complexity of supporting different operating systems and workstations. Hosted Deskop means there is far less to go wrong than a traditional PC."
He added that recent data breaches and technological improvements are making the idea of virtualised technology much more attractive, removing the need for expensive, on-site resources such as
data-storage devices.
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