The data centre skills crisis: How to avert disaster

The modern data centre – a highly automated, dense and virtualised IT infrastructure – demands that IT professionals understand multiple disciplines as well as the facilities infrastructure. In addition, to adopt these new features and trends the data centre architecture has to be dynamic and supporting mission-critical applications, which require specific skills to deliver performance, availability and security.

Unfortunately, at the same time as pressure on the data centre has increased, there has also been a decline in the pool of professionals qualified to run and maintain these facilities. A shortage in the right skillsets, a deficit of relevant training programmes and the increasing complexity of the data centre environment has led to an impending data centre talent crisis.

Reasons for the skills gap
There are several reasons for the data centre skills gap, which can be summarised as follows:
Lack of a structured career track at an architect level: a well-defined career track to acquire the skills required for data centre operations and management is frequently missing in many organisations. Currently, the journey to become a DC architect is different for different people with few attempts of standardisation. However, a more defined model, such as creating Centres of Excellence, or investing in infrastructure to enable hands-on experience would ensure that a DC architect has exposure to the required skill ingredients in the right proportion. Too few foundation programmes cover the data centre as a topic: organisations such as large service providers frequently run a factory conveyor belt model to build skills. Unfortunately, these programmes operate mostly at an individual level. If these programmes were integrated at the data centre level, however, it would help create a larger work force with base-level knowledge of various aspects of the data centre to build upon.

Lack of academic focus: major programming languages, models related to synchronous data link control (SDLC), IT quality frameworks and the like are all covered as part of IT degrees.

While these courses help create skills in the fashionable Application Development & Management area, there are hardly any specific topics covered at an academic level for specialised subjects such as the data centre. This lack of support at the grassroots level affects career choices and opportunities for IT graduates at the very start of their working lives.

Few employability options post-college: due to an absence of data centre education in degree programmes, a fresh graduate is rarely able to find employment opportunities in this highly complex and critical environment. In addition, choosing the data centre area as a career track is not very lucrative at the beginning. The complexity of the job requires graduate trainees to undergo a number of years of job shadowing as well as extra training to procure the required certifications to operate safely in the environment.

Insufficient training and certifications at the data centre level: the fast changing technology trends that impact the data centre environment means that DC professionals are required to constantly update their skillsets at a rapid pace. However, while in some areas, such as virtualisation, comprehensive training and certification programs exist, in others, for example cloud computing, more structured and standardised qualifications are required for advanced data centre architect roles.

Geographical pooling of data centres: there has also been a shift in the geographical location of data centres that means a high number of skilled people are needed in very concentrated geographical pockets. To provide statistical context, according to IDC more than 85 per cent of the data centres in the world are located in the USA and Western Europe. However, while emerging Asian markets such as China, Singapore and other Asian nations are seeing strong data centre growth due to the growing demands of their economies, the skills crisis in the West today is acute.

Recommendations to address the skills crisis
The shortage of appropriate skills is emerging as a significant and complex challenge to growth and future of data centre operations across organisations. As a result, productivity, efficiency, and morale suffer. However, there are a number of areas in which this skills crisis can be addressed.

These include:
Skills development
Skills development lies at the heart of the solution and different organisations will need to adopt different approaches. For example, at an in-house organisational level, IT should focus primarily on developing strong data centre and enterprise data centre architecture skills. At the same time, facilities and operations management should be part of in-house support in the case of customer-owned data centres.

On the other hand, data centre service providers should develop strong support skills in the server, storage, network and database areas while storage and network architect skills are also needed to provide end-to-end data centre management services.

Data centre products and tools providers will also need to do their bit by investing in advanced training and certification programmes for the industry. In addition, a big change needs to take place in the course structure of IT-related academic degrees to integrate data centre relevant topics, including DCIM, virtualisation and cloud provisioning into their curricula.

In the area of skills sourcing:
Organisations will also need to become better at sourcing and using the skills available on the market. At the in-house level, for example, organisations should look into partnering with competent service providers that have specialties in areas such as server, network, storage, database and operations.

Co-located data centres can also explore the option of sourcing data centre architects from the service provider, if these skills are not available in-house.

At the data centre service provider level, the provider should create a comprehensive framework for developing and sourcing data centre skills at various levels. Data centre competency-built programs at the foundation level must be devised so that the sourcing function can take in fresh college graduates and train them in data centre skills. A clearly defined career track will help junior staff stay focused on developing higher expertise up to the architect level.

For a new data centre location:
Apart from factors such as the cost of real estate, power tariff rates, geographical stability, and political stability, the new location of a data centre should also take into account the availability of relevant data centre skills at that location. For example, some of the emerging market locations like China and India have a large and relevant skills base for data centre services, making them worthwhile options to pursue.

Winds of change
Over the last two decades, the data centre has emerged as one of the enterprise’s most valuable and highly visible assets. However, there has not been a commensurate increase in the skills necessary to maintain this infrastructure, leading to a skills gap that must be addressed as soon as possible. This can be done through the concentrated efforts of all the players in the data centre ecosystem, such as the organisations, the service providers and academia. Data centre-specific courses and training programmes such as those in virtualisation and cloud-computing can fill a knowledge gap and help ensure a well-qualified team with the skills necessary to run an increasingly mission-critical facility like the data centre.
It is positive to see that signs of such industry collaboration are already emerging. In the UK, for example, the industry body Data Centre Alliance has teamed up with academic institutions to offer data centre training and suitability assessment programmes that aims to give graduates the additional knowledge needed to successfully apply for data centre roles.

This is a step in the right direction, however, many years of work and a lot of cultural change still needs to take place for the data centre skills crisis to be resolved.