In the not too distant past, if you were in IT and had virtualization skills, you probably thought your future as an IT admin was secure.

Today, that is no longer the case.

In "The Big Switch" by Nicholas Carr, the author explains how the use of electricity in larger businesses shifted from on-premises systems (companies had electricity departments, complete with electrical architects and managers) to third-party electrical grids that businesses simply tapped into. Electricity went from an item on which businesses focused a lot of their time, attention and labor to a simple utility they plugged into and paid for. For IT, the relevant analogy to on-premises vs. cloud solutions is obvious.

In the mix is also the debate between operating expense (i.e. the cloud approach) and capital expense (i.e. the on-premises approach) and although there are compromises with both, it's clear that the former is increasingly favored. In the age-old “rent versus buy” debate, the cloud is making rental seem very compelling, especially as managed cloud environments begin to implement tools that provide automated turn-on/turn-off for application functionality and resources (and incrementally manage costs.)

In many family offices—like other businesses—IT has held great prominence, a significant budget...and is often the cause of some of the office’s biggest pain-points. But the paradigm shift has begun and now, for instance, a business can sign up for cloud-based Office 365, an office manager can be designated as the administrator using a simple Web interface, and users can work from anywhere on any device. What was once handled by IT is becoming a commodity service provided by something very much like a public utility.

I have been consulting around technology in wealth management and the family office for over 30 years, and my advice to IT professionals looking for any longevity in their IT careers is to be proactive. To keep pace, IT has to shift from its traditional role as a system operator to that of a strategic advisor and solution manager. The future is application support, not IT support.

The shift to a full cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model is here. Over the next five years, there will be hybrid and convergence solutions (such as co-source) to provide a transition from on-premises IT to the cloud, especially as legacy vendors try to extend the life of their aging applications, but ultimately there will be little on-premises IT left.

On-premises won’t be saved by the concerns over security, availability and performance. There are already tools to meet these concerns and with even more exciting ones on the way. Technology is going in a direction that's unstoppable and the utility model is the future. And if you are a small to medium size family office, many of these benefits are attainable today.