A majority of organizations will find their growth constrained by a lack of new data center skills by 2016, according to a report from Gartner Inc.
Capacity planning and performance management skills within IT infrastructure and operations teams are no longer sufficient to meet business needs in the digital economy era, the firm says. By 2016, the availability of capacity and performance management skills for horizontally scaled architectures will be a major constraint or risk to growth for 80 percent of major businesses, it says.
"While major organizations continue to maintain and sustain their conventional capacity-planning skills and tools, they need to regularly re-evaluate the tools available and develop the capacity and performance management skills present in the Web-scale IT community," Ian Head, research director at Gartner, said in a statement.
"Web-scale IT organizations do things differently—they learn from one another,” Head said. “Conventional IT organizations can use some of the Web-scale techniques heading for mainstream adoption in the next three years."
To help IT infrastructure and operations professionals focus their efforts, Gartner recommends that they embrace stateless application architectures and horizontally scaling infrastructure architectures to improve capacity and performance management; develop and use “demand-shaping” techniques to adjust the quantity of resources required by any particular service so that the infrastructure doesn’t become overloaded; and become proficient in operational analytics tools and big data capabilities.
This story originally appeared on Information Management.
