76% of IT Decision Makers say they are facing challenges implementing a hybrid IT model.1
Keeping up with today’s feverish pace of technological advancement in IT can be like drinking from a fire hydrant. The pace of innovation can be overwhelming even for the most experienced professionals. Keeping abreast of IT innovation is not the only challenge however. As companies accelerate digital transformation initiatives, the demand for IT professionals with the necessary skillsets to transform legacy driven data centers into hybrid infrastructures is skyrocketing. As a result, demand is outpacing supply.
TOP 10 CHALLENGES FOR FINDING QUALIFIED TALENT
| Challenge Area | U.S & Canada | Latin America | EMEA | Asia-Pacific |
| Cybersecurity | 31% | 37% | 30% | 31% |
| Cloud Computing | 25% | 36% | 30% | 32% |
| Networking & Wirless | 19% | 23% | 21% | 18% |
| Application Development | 18% | 14% | 20% | 14% |
| Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) | 15% | 23% | 18% | 22% |
| Enterprise Architecture | 17% | 16% | 19% | 14% |
| Virtualization | 14% | 22% | 19% | 20% |
| Leadership and Management | 16% | 20% | 15% | 18% |
| Analytics and Big Data | 16% | 17% | 13% | 20% |
| Data Center | 13% | 18% | 16% | 17% |
Table 1. Top 10 challenge areas for finding qualified talent, 2017 IT Skills and Salary Report.2
In a 2017 IT Skills and Salary Report by Global Knowledge Training LLC, 73% of IT decision makers (from companies in the U.S and Canada) said their teams are facing a skills shortage, and Table 1 above lists the top 10 challenge areas for finding qualified talent.2 The problem only compounds when discussing cybersecurity, as another recent study showed that 33% of organizations say that they have a “problematic shortage” of cloud security specialists.3
This dearth of IT professionals hinders the ability of organizations to achieve their transformation objectives and harness the potential agility and scalability that hybrid IT has to offer. It also increases the vulnerability of these organizations and their exposure to cyber attacks and other risks. Table 2 below further demonstrates the impact of this skills gap on the organization. IT decision makers are reporting increased stress on existing employees (61%), difficulty meeting quality objectives (43%), delayed deployments of new hardware and/or software (36%), and increased operating costs (31%). It isn’t just a matter of staying on top of the latest data center technologies however. While the management of traditional data centers are driven by siloed skillsets, hybrid IT demands a more horizontal skillset. Thanks to the converged infrastructures that are inherent in Hybrid IT environments, compute, storage, and network resources are preconfigured and thus easily implemented in quick fashion. As a result, enterprises are no longer as dependent on highly focused IT specialists. Hybrid IT environments on the other hand require expansive skillsets that not only includes cloud technology skills, but soft skills as well, such as greater communication and business abilities. This technical brief provides a breakdown of the types of skills and expertise that IT professionals need today to thrive within hybrid IT environments.
IMPACT OF SKILLS GAPS ON THE ORGANIZATION
| Impact | 2017 | 2016 |
| Increased stress on existing employees | 61% | 68% |
| Difficulty meeting quality objectives | 43% | 47% |
| Delays in developing new products or services | 39% | 42% |
| Delayed deployments of new hardware and/or software | 36% | 42% |
| Increased operating costs | 31% | 37% |
| Declining customer satisfaction | 31% | 37% |
| Loss of business to competitors | 27% | 27% |
| Loss of revenue | 23% | 27% |
1. DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURES
Adapting to the distributed architecture of a hybrid IT environment means expanding the enterprise to incorporate numerous cloud service providers across multiple geographies. Today’s IT professionals must be able to provide ongoing support for applications, devices, networks and systems regardless of location. By transferring applications and their required resources to third party hosting centers, the responsibility of remediation concerning service disruptions and performance issues is transferred as well. Internal IT must grow accustomed to this dependency on third party support teams while putting contingency failover strategies in place in order to implement automated failovers to other data centers or cloud providers. As more partners are plugged into the enterprise, the complexity of the architecture increases as well. It is essential to understand the relationship between existing architecture and subsequent cloud architectures being introduced into the IT environment.
2. MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT TOOLS
While internal IT is not responsible for the maintenance and support of the partnered infrastructures, they are responsible for creating and managing a distributed architecture that incorporates agility and high availability to prevent downtime. Doing so requires constant monitoring of all components in the hybrid enterprise. The on-premises monitoring and management tools that IT has grown accustomed to do not have the scalability to effectively implement multiple platforms. Rather than look at separate infrastructure components such as compute, storage and networking from a disparate view, hybrid IT environments require a complete view of both the on-premises data center and cloud environments in a single unified view.
3. VENDOR MANAGEMENT
The role of the Network Manager or Network Administrator is now transitioning to that of the IT Broker. Using the traditional IT model, business units within the organization were offered the single solution of the data center to service their needs. Sometimes this meant forcing a square peg into a round hole. In a hybrid IT environment, the goal is not to just foster a solution from existing infrastructure, but find the optimum solution, no matter where the trail ensues. In most cases, solutions will not be created by internal IT, but brokered through relationships with third party cloud providers. This transition to an IT broker is a natural part of transforming your enterprise to a distributed architecture. It requires that IT professionals not only understand the respective technologies being offered, but also have the business mindset in order to negotiate SLAs and pricing structures with multiple cloud partners. Being familiar with specific vendors of cloud solutions will be critical in the new shared responsibility model of hybrid IT.
4. APPLICATION MIGRATION
The app is now the quintessential tool in which companies communicate with their customers and it is the job of IT to find the ideal hosting environment for those applications. This requires an innate understanding of available cloud product suites and cloud stacks from leading vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, VMware and others, in order to attain the proficiency to migrate apps between different environments. Issues such as changing compliancy requirements or data sovereignty concerns may constitute migrating different applications repeatedly between on and off premises environments. Unlike the traditional IT enterprise in which application migration required months of involved preparation and planning, migrations within the hybrid environment must be streamlined for prompt efficiency.
5. AUTOMATION AND SOFTWARE-DEFINED INFRASTRUCTURE
IT personnel must learn how to incorporate automation skills as companies begin the process of software defining their infrastructures. The ability to instantly provision resources and services in these software-defined ecospheres requires the ability to manage them with policies and templates. Rather than separating disparate configuration process from the deployment process, provisioning is now an all-inclusive progression of tasks that are performed in a single comprehensive process. This also includes the assignment of security policies so that newly provisioned elements are locked down immediately. Those with developer skills who can automate tasks and processes will prove exceptionally valuable.
6. CLOUD SECURITY
Cloud security doesn’t just entail the ability to secure resources. It is also about transparency and compliancy. Transparency concerns the ability to gain visibility into security practices in order to gain visibility into the security state of your cloud service providers. This is done by obtaining audit rights to the security practices of your third party partners in order to ensure that practices adhere to policies and compliance standards. Internal IT must ensure that providers practice the proper procedures concerning data handling, change management, and internal communications within the cloud service provider’s organization. Having a thorough understanding of regulatory compliance is necessary in order to assign host locations to your company’s data and resources.
SUMMARY
It is no wonder that some of the hottest IT certifications today involve cloud services such as AWS and Azure. Hybrid IT is a whole new world, and learning the skills it requires will open new worlds of opportunity for IT professionals as well. Hybrid IT does more than expand the size and scope of the enterprise; it expands the mindset and knowledge base of those who successfully transition their skill sets to this new architecture. While Hybrid IT offers companies an escape from the inflexible fixed cost hardware structure of the traditional data center, it also provides an IT professional’s passage from a world of siloed skill sets and mundane support tasks. Hybrid IT offers IT professionals a career of challenging and rewarding experiences, making it a win-win for employers and employees alike.
Sources:
1. IDG Research commissioned by WEI, June 20, 2017.
2. 2017 Skills and Salary Report, Global Knowledge Training LLC. https://mindhubpro.pearsonvue.com/v/vspfiles/documents/2017_Global_Knowledge_SalaryReport.pdf
3. High-demand Cybersecurity Skill Sets. Jon Oltsik, CSO, May 10, 2016. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3068177/security/high-demand-cybersecurity-skill-sets.html
