Over 65% of organisations surveyed in 451 Research’s latest study, Voice of the Enterprise, said recruiting for roles across traditional and converged infrastructures is becoming more difficult.
The cost of public cloud in the long term future is encouraging some IT Managers to retain and even expand their on-premise infrastructure; however plans for this suffer as the shortage of server skilled individuals increases.
451 Research’s survey revealed that the need to look for more server-related employees over the next 12 months was driven by overall business growth at 67.7% and IT organisational changes at 42.4%.
Increasing cost of cloud computing encourage on-premises servers, where skills lack
As cloud migration increases across business, 451 Research analysts anticipate that the availability of full time employees dedicated to server administration across the globe will inevitably decline.
Within the survey, 69.7% of respondents cite current candidates’ lack of skills and experience, plus a lack of candidates by region and high salaries, as the main reasons hiring for server based roles are becoming increasingly difficult.
When respondents were asked to define which characteristics best represented the layout of their IT technical teams, two IT archetypes split respondents almost equally with 40.4% choosing IT specialises and 39.4% choosing IT generalists.
Expected rises in server and converged infrastructure-related staffing partly reflects the practice that some IT managers are aligning their server purchasing and staffing with business growth.
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Christian Perry, Research Manager and Lead Analyst of 451 Research’s survey, said: “The time and resource savings from these new technologies results in a slightly reduced need for server specialists.
“The good news is that there remains a need for specialists across both standalone servers and converged and hyper converged infrastructures. This is especially true within LOBs or remote divisions or departments.”
As automation, orchestration and software-defined technologies have taken over, 451 Research has found a trend veering toward generalists to fulfill different roles across a company with different technology needs.
Read More: Hiring in the age of automation
The need for IT specialists opens up a new opportunity for server, converged infrastructure and hyper converged vendors to closely work alongside customers and prospects to help them understand the long-term staffing implications of their products.
Analysts at 451 Research believe that by acting as trusted advisors vendors can benefit by helping customers achieve proper staffing levels by providing them a deeper understanding of optimal infrastructure use and distribution of resources.
Perry said: “Most IT managers are closely scrutinising heir deployment options instead of blindly following the pack to IaaS and other off-premises cloud services.
“When determining the optimal mix of on-and-off premises compute resources, there is no doubt this is hampered by the availability of specialists skills and regional availability. Whether organisations will realise their expected server staff expansions remains to be seen due to hiring difficulties.”
