Skills Shortage? Talk with NetApp

“Talent shortages and skills mismatches are not a new phenomenon. It has always been the case that, as business needs and job requirements change, the supply of people with the right skills lags behind.”

—McKinsey & Company, November 2019

After nearly 40 years of bicycle road racing, I decided a new venture was in order and opted to take up the cycling discipline of cyclocross. Cyclocross (CX) places a greater emphasis on skills than road racing—as well as requiring a significantly different skillset. Most courses are purposely designed to force the rider to dismount the bike and run, while carrying the bike, for short periods, and then remount and ride until the next obstacle. You might not realize it until you try it: Gracefully dismounting and remounting a bicycle while running uphill and/or in mud are developed skills. Skills that, presently, I am in a shortage of.

Although certainly in a different domain than cyclocross skills, IT is experiencing a skills gap of its own. It turns out that moving and managing resources in a cloud is quite different from doing so on premises. McKinsey states that 87% of companies have, or expect to have, skill gaps within the next few years. Closer to “home,” ESG shows in its “2021 Technology Spending Intentions Report” that cloud/IT architecture is the most common area of skills shortage. Why? There are several reasons: Companies trying to recruit only “unicorns” and poorly executed reskilling programs are a couple of them.

NetApp understands the desire (and need) to leverage existing skillsets to address tomorrow’s business strategy. NetApp helps close the IT skills gap by letting you manage your cloud and on-premises data and infrastructure from a single toolset: NetApp^® Cloud Manager.

Cloud Manager delivers on the promise of the hybrid multicloud environment by managing infrastructure simply and easily across the hybrid environment, offering point-and-click simplicity to enable an array of data management services. Don’t take NetApp’s word for it. Here’s what GigaOm had to say in its report GigaOm Radar for Cloud File Systems:

Based on ONTAP, Cloud Volumes has been architected to support hybrid deployments natively, whether on-premises or in the cloud. 

Cloud Volumes abstracts the underlying cloud infrastructure and deployment model to present users with a single control plane, and the management of all systems is unified under Cloud Manager, NetApp’s management console.

Leading the competition is NetApp, whose coherent multi-cloud strategy and outstanding execution translates into a continuous data management plane (across clouds and locations), a comprehensive enterprise-grade feature set, and varied, flexible deployment options.

To further ease the burden of the IT skills gap, NetApp has made it simpler to protect your hybrid cloud databases and to create and manage nonproduction (dev, test, training, QA) databases. With NetApp SnapCenter^® technology, NetApp provides a consistent operational model for your databases, regardless of location, and without costly refactoring. You can read more about this capability in TR-4908: Hybrid Cloud Database Solutions with SnapCenter Overview.

For more on what NetApp can do for your databases, see our pages on Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft SQL Server. If you like videos, check out Oracle and SAP on NetApp TV.