Top data center skills admins can use in 2020

Job opportunities in the tech sector continued to grow in 2019. In 2020, administrators should develop expertise in cloud computing architecture, edge computing deployment, and automation.

The job market is looking bright for data center professionals. Employment in the tech industry is growing year over year, and there is no shortage of data center skills or expertise.

As demand for cloud computing services grows, 5G implementations intensify, and enterprises undergo more digital transformation, administrators can sharpen their skills to address numerous infrastructure challenges.

Tech jobs continue to grow at a steady pace. Research firm CompTIA says 67% of network technology jobs are in technical occupations, such as software developers, network architects and database administrators. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the industry has added an average of 24,000 jobs per month over the past two years.

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The software industry is driving the growth of technology jobs, as software jobs accounted for nearly one-third of new technology jobs in the past decade. The growing popularity of cloud computing and various as-a-service offerings have supported this growth. IT service and support functions accounted for nearly 66% of all jobs in the past decade and are expected to see double-digit growth in the next decade.

Recruitment agency Dice reports that data center job openings have increased in the last year. Network architect jobs have increased by 16%, database administrators have increased by 11%, and network/system administrators have increased by 6%. Database architects top the list with a 21% increase.

Salaries reflect more than just experience

Despite huge fluctuations depending on geography, area of ​​expertise, and industry, employees in the tech industry still earn higher average compensation than employees in other industries in the United States.

CompTIA says the median salary for tech jobs is double the U.S. non-tech average, at $81,900. Dice's 2019 Tech Salary Report found it's even higher, at an average of $93,244.

Many departments have six-figure salaries at management level and above. The technology department is powered primarily by people in their respective contributor roles, thanks to specific skills and critical systems knowledge.

Top Data Center Skills

Traditionally, administrators have typically focused on certain parts of local management, such as asset tracking, network troubleshooting, or specific hardware skills.

As more computing power moves to the cloud and the cloud infrastructure industry consolidates, administrators must use their expertise to oversee the changing architecture. Admins should understand the fundamentals of cloud computing, containerization, and artificial intelligence to be able to handle implementation, monitoring, troubleshooting, and updates.

The top ten highest-paying technical positions all have annual salaries of more than $100,000, ranging from Golang programming specialists at up to $130,000 to HANA cloud application specialists at nearly $123,000. As infrastructure evolves, administrators should focus on the following data center skills:

Edge computing deployment

By 2025, it is expected that more than 75 billion IoT devices will be connected to the Internet. IT administrators must rethink their network architecture and how server processing hardware handles all the data. Edge computing deployments will help administrators collect and analyze data from IoT devices and then transmit the data back to a remote or local data center. This requires administrators to address remote hardware maintenance and software updates, as well as specialized data backup and storage requirements.

Data Traffic and Hybrid IT Management

Most organizations use hybrid cloud deployments for part of their network architecture. Research firm Gartner found that a typical enterprise typically uses 24 cloud computing services from nine different cloud computing providers.

Services such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform make it easier to host and serve applications and services. IT administrators must have data center skills to ensure that the network bandwidth between these applications is optimized for speed and capacity to support the data transmitted through it; whether that transmission is across clouds or from the cloud to an on-premises data center.

cloud computing

The skills needed to ensure a smooth cloud computing setup include network security; knowledge of various database software such as MongoDB, Hadoop and Amazon DynamoDB; development skills such as development, deployment and testing, and familiarity with Chef, Ansible, Atlassian Bamboo and Splunk.

During 2020, admins should understand how cloud applications and services integrate into their data centers and enterprise workflows. Effective cloud monitoring and cloud capacity management are important to help troubleshoot any potential issues that may arise.

Automation Implementation

If the enterprise decides to take advantage of the new automation, AI, and machine learning-based use cases that are being developed, organizations must incorporate high-performance computing into their data centers and do it without risking tool and process deduplication or incurring additional hidden costs.

IT administrators should improve their soft skills, such as collaboration and project management, as well as their technical abilities as automation engineers or consultants, who must be able to develop implementation strategies; gather requirements from other departments and teams; create and execute test scripts; and install related applications and databases.