Bridging the skills gap

The shortage of skilled workers remains a key challenge in all areas of IT, but is particularly becoming an issue as enterprises transition to hybrid cloud infrastructure. IDC’s 2019 Worldwide CIO Agenda shows that 30% of high-demand roles for emerging technologies will remain unfilled through 2022, and a lack of cloud talent has the potential to cost enterprises as much as $258 million a year in lost revenues and slower innovation. 

Additionally, not having the right skills can impede both the maintenance and the care of increasingly complex technology systems. It also creates challenges in testing, evaluating and implementing new innovations in the business. With this in mind, here are four approaches to overcoming your skills gap challenges:

Training

Hybrid cloud requires a new set of skills and competencies in areas related to cloud-native application development or automation, among others. Organisations can, however, close their in-house skills gap through internal programmes, self-directed training, and external education. The three disciplines worth investigating here are: Full-Stack Development, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps Engineering, each of which can enhance the development, management and operation of your hybrid cloud environment.

Automation

Automation is a key foundation of hybrid cloud infrastructures, reducing your headcount by taking over the provisioning and management of cloud workloads. Indeed, Programmable Software Defined environments, which encompass multi-cloud networking, storage and other vital subsystems, have come to rely heavily on automation. Without it, hybrid cloud becomes expensive and complex to manage and orchestrate. Automation enables VMs and workloads to be provisioned, tested and spun up in seconds. And you can use a hybrid orchestrator to enable workloads to be continually shifted and balanced according to policies set by IT. This saves labour costs and improves your response times and utilisation rates.

Management

Automation aside, more and more large enterprises are choosing to outsource the provision of their hybrid multi-cloud management to expert service providers like HPE. That way, IT personnel can focus on tasks that benefit the business more directly, such as IT innovation, implementing new services and supporting new revenue streams.

HPE’s GreenLake as-a-service proposition simplifies IT operations and management by unifying an organisation’s datacentre, edge, and public and private cloud systems. It gives CIOs control of their organisation’s on and off-premise hybrid IT estate through a unified dashboard and operational console that positions them as service brokers to the rest of the business.

Tools

HPE’s GreenLake also gives IT teams sophisticated application development tools, which can help businesses to bridge the skills gap. The simple ‘point, click, get’ pay-per-use platform allows developers to write, release, and deploy code quickly, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. In addition, they can access a wide array of tools and services from HPE and partners through a marketplace, giving them one ‘workbench’ from which to design and create applications at high speed. CIOs get access to their own set of tools via a unified dashboard and operational console, giving them control over their organisation’s hybrid IT estate. With these, IT leaders can monitor and take action on a range of KPIs, including security, capacity, cost, compliance, and resource utilisation.

So, through training and upskilling, tools and automation, and outsourcing IT management through a service like HPE GreenLake, businesses can close their IT skills gap and get the most out of hybrid cloud.

To discover more benefits about HPE Greenlake, and how it can help to narrow your hybrid cloud skills gap, click here to visit the HPE website.