Hyperscalers such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, which provide cloud, networking, and internet services at scale, each have slightly different feature sets. This results in a complicated management environment.
Hyperscalers have no compelling reason for consistency [with their competitors], so if you’ve got particular feature sets that you’re interested in for workloads, you have to use that vendor’s cloud and API [application programming interface].
That makes it hard to move critical workloads completely into an integrated hybrid or multicloud, he says. The practical result is that private clouds are not going away. Another reason why private clouds are not going away, according to Mike Lyons, chief technology officer of the Network and Edge Global Practice at Kyndryl: These on-premises solutions provide “clear control of your crown jewels applications.”
Compounding complex systems management is an ongoing staffing and skills gap. This is especially true with regard to network engineers, analysts, and cybersecurity professionals.
In the Global Knowledge “2021 IT Skills and Salary Report,” more than half of the surveyed IT decision-makers reported that hiring for essential IT positions is “somewhat difficult or extremely difficult.”
Cybersecurity personnel are in especially high demand — not surprising, given the epidemic of cybercrime. For example, Check Point Research (CPR) reported in October 2021 that there were 40% more attacks weekly on organizations in 2021 than in 2020. And there is still a worldwide skills shortage. According to the “(ISC2) Cybersecurity Workforce Study, 2021,” published by the nonprofit ISC2 (International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium), the global cybersecurity workforce is still about 65% below what organizations need in order to fill all the current open positions worldwide.
This is a perfect storm: a complex patchwork of legacy and SDN-based networks connecting LANs, WANs, and enterprise data centers as well as hybrid clouds and multiclouds, but without sufficient personnel on staff to protect and thoroughly manage these vital enterprise assets.
Is there a bright spot? Perhaps. Old architectures and inefficient approaches that were slow to adapt to disruptive change in the past two years may have set the stage for organizations to accelerate their network modernization and emerge stronger.