It’s a new day for IT teams seeking new talent. The traditional IT manager isn’t enough; around 77% of enterprise organizations now have at least one application in the cloud. Virtualization skills are now a necessity.
How is today’s IT talent different? What new skills will they need to exist in the brave new world of cloud data and virtual infrastructures?
Modern Skills for Cloud IT
The criteria for hiring IT teams are changing. Hiring a traditional systems engineer is perhaps not the best idea; look instead for cloud-savvy server virtualization experts to modernize your stack and your talent.
Here’s what the difference between these two experts looks like:
- The average systems engineer understands one or several operating systems and has a good deal of networking experience. You’ll see a resume with the big traditional names like Cisco and Oracle. If they’ve never deployed to the cloud, their stack may be a bit outdated for the new virtual environments.
- The average virtualization expert must be competent in several disciplines. They should understand how storage area networks (SANs) work against network-attached storage (NAS). Look for skills with Gigabit Ethernet or expertise with InfiniBand. They should also understand authentication schemes from Radius to LDAP and how traditional racked servers compare to blade systems. A virtualization expert also understands the various applications deployed in each virtual machine and how they interact with the overall performance of the network.
Virtualization skills are hot, so an IT expert with server or data storage virtualization experience is highly employable. Today’s modern virtualization expert must straddle a number of disciplines precisely because virtualization is invading all kinds of IT architectures. They should have experience with applications from different vendors; including mail, web, and application servers. The virtualization expert must be able to architect and manage these tools in a variety of different sized environments.
Virtualization usually requires physical consolidation, so the virtual expert must know how to design and implement reliable infrastructures. They must also understand high-availability solutions and their impact on the network, operating system or application in the virtual data center.
Security is also different in the virtual world. While backups can happen frequently in the cloud, the virtualization expert must understand these third-party solutions and how they influence the performance of the infrastructure.
For traditional IT engineers that fail to catch up to these virtual environment skills, they run the risk of lagging behind their counterparts. Without an IT architect with virtual skills, companies will also lag behind, which could decrease their productivity and hurt their business.
Hiring the Virtual IT Team
Corporate hiring teams must consider talent with virtualization expertise. Is it time to reassess the skill profiles of the architect or engineer you’re looking for? Consider your current plans for moving to a cloud environment. If you’re not there yet, are the chances high that you will be soon?
Blackstone Talent Group is standing by with the IT virtualization expert you’ve been looking for. Talk to our team to determine how we can help.