Bridging the skills gap from data centre to cloud

BRIDGING THE SKILLS GAP FROM DATA CENTER TO CLOUD Why Do We Need a Bridge? “Software is eating the world.” Marc Andreesen wrote these prophetic words in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, and today, it’s safe to say that software is still eating the world. One way this has manifested itself is in how application needs drive cloud strategies and directions. In a recent survey, 451 Research found that the future of IT is multi-cloud and hybrid, with 69% of respondents planning to have some type of multi-cloud environment by 2019.1 While every company’s digital transformation journey is unique, a common theme in recent months is making the cloud the predominant technology infrastructure. This reliance on cloud represents a “brave new world” for IT, one that makes it responsible for the success—or failure—of its company’s transformation efforts. This raises a new set of challenges and opportunities that IT organizations must be aware of as they move ahead. How the Skills Gap Emerged IT has been implementing private clouds and supporting use of public clouds?for several years now. But the pace of cloud adoption and usage has dramatically increased as companies across industries become digital businesses. As that pace quickens, IT must consider new ways to address concerns about data security and scalability, as well as find new ways to free up time and reduce costs. This rapidly evolving landscape has exposed a serious vulnerability: a growing skills gap in IT. Companies are quickly realizing that their teams aren’t competitive with their knowledge of evolving technologies. A recent survey posed the question: “Will your organization experience any IT skills shortages during the next 12 months?”—and 59% of IT decision-makers reported experiencing skills shortages. 2 The struggle to find the right IT skill sets has significant ramifications: 33% of IT decision-makers say that lack of the right cloud skill sets is the biggest challenge to implementing a cloud computing strategy. 3 This skills gap and associated workforce shortage is partly due to an underestimation of cloud as the transformative approach to IT that it has become. As such, there has been a tendency to take the underestimated view that current skills are sufficient or just need to be adapted to this new technology. Second, there is also a natural tendency to resist change in IT. After all, a primary IT driver to minimize risk and change can actually increase risk in this scenario. IT has also historically adhered to inside-out thinking—knowing what an IT customer needs based on requirementsgathering—versus outside-in or actively collaborating with their customers to iteratively arrive at a solution they really need. Finally, the skills gap in IT is also due in part to common resource constraints — do more with less — which don’t leave much room for new things like skills development or innovation that can come from that. But even if IT successfully addresses these challenges, individual contributors within IT can still be a barrier to overall success. 1 http://www.information-age.com/multi-cloudhybrid-environment-dominate-enterprise-123469737/ 2 State of the CIO Report,” IDG/CIO 2018 3 State of the CIO, IDG, January 2018 W H I T E PA P E R | 3 BRIDGING THE SKILLS GAP FROM DATA CENTER TO CLOUD Individual Contributors Also Play a Role Like the IT organization, sometimes skilled individuals are resistant to change. While maintaining the status quo may work in the short term, in the long term, a different approach is needed. Cloud, and its underlying software-defined infrastructure, is not going away. Embracing a new cloud strategy is a career-enhancing opportunity and this is how it should be positioned. Individual contributors who are open to change and seek the opportunity to move forward are some of the individuals who will benefit most from the information in this white paper. Re-skilling or “upskilling” these resources to better adapt to these new cloud technologies will ultimately benefit the organization as a whole. The Right Skills Propel Digital Transformation The digital transformation has led to a significant shift in how IT delivers business applications. Historically, IT infrastructure and software applications were created?to support and automate business processes to increase productivity and throughput. Today, business applications are emerging as the foundation for new business models. IT infrastructure needs to evolve to support this shift and be made available as software that incorporates a wide range of application types, locations, and platforms. Organizations demand faster innovation—it is a business imperative. They expect a more flexible, customer-focused, service-oriented IT model that leverages modernized data centers in the form of a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Highly dynamic, agile, available, and programmatic compute, network, storage, and security services are?no longer a business advantage—they’re a core operational requirement. To meet these expectations, IT must be prepared to deliver the skills necessary to fully support the software-defined nature of the private cloud implemented in a modernized data center. To provide the level of agility the business expects, IT needs skills to optimize its use of automation coupled with policy-based control throughout the operating environment. Having the right skills ensures IT can operate efficiently and pursue business innovation. TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR TRAINING A good way to initiate change is through self-paced training. VMware Education Services can also be reinforced and supplemented in interactions with VMware Professional Services while they’re on-site helping implement or apply VMware solutions to the company’s cloud strategy. Operating in a hybrid cloud environment means having the skills to move “up the stack” by becoming more application-centric. This applies not only to the way IT operates the environment, but also how it provides services to the application developer community. IT needs to be equally comfortable supporting traditional applications, as well as SaaS-based and next-generation applications. Addressing the Skills Gap Closing the skills gap is not an insurmountable challenge. This is not a case where?IT has to completely start over; rather, it’s about updating and supplementing existing skills, or applying them to new problems, or approaching them with a different mindset. This shift in perspective starts with being open to new opportunities and being recognized as a change agent within your organization. W H I T E PA P E R | 4