Not Just the End of IT, the End of IT Contractor

SD-WAN isn't magic, colud infra is operated by an army of admins and engineers. I knew of plenty traditional admins that moved to work for aws for example. Even on the client end, network consultants become sd-wan optimization consultants, cloud engineers,architects,security,etc...

Things still break and need fixing. Hackers still hack in the cloud and via sd-wan, you still need people to manage and troubleshoot remote sd-wan connectivity or enable devops for your cloud app.

People that won't adopt and move to newer tech and new fields get removed but anyone good at their trade who is willing to learn new tricks will remain in IT. I can tell you that with my limited exposure, it is a big pain to troubleshoot issues with a sd-wan or cloud provider compares to on-prem systems and network, you will need someone on your end that knows your setup, needs and issues to work out projects and problems with them. Before you troubleshot why the latency to your onprem website server was bad and you looked at onprem network gear and local ISP, now you trouboeshoot why your SD-wan access to your site hosted on Azure has high latency and you look at some on prem gear, mostly sdwan infra with their people and cloud infra in the cloud consoe/api and/or with cloud support.