Information technology firms are finding it difficult to hire staff for roles across traditional servers and converged infrastructure due to a decline in the number of applicants with the necessary skills, a new report from 451 Research Inc. reveals.

Because of the need to reduce costs associated with storing data in public clouds, many companies have opted to preserve and in some cases expand their on-premises server infrastructure. In turn, that has placed greater pressures on the hiring of staff with specialist server skills, the analyst firm said.

The report, Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure, gathered responses from 525 web-based surveys and 19 phone interviews. It found that nearly 70 percent of organizations felt that current applicants for these kinds of roles lacked the skills and experience required to do the job capably.

“Most IT managers are closely scrutinizing their deployment options instead of blindly following the pack to IaaS and other off-premises cloud services,” said Christian Perry, research manager at 451 Research. “When determining the optimal mix of on and off-premises compute resources, there is no doubt this is hampered by the availability of specialist skills and regional availability.”

451 Research said that it expects the server specialist talent pool to shrink even further as cloud migration increases. It adds that a lack of available internal talent to facilitate migration away from the public cloud will only exacerbate these staffing problems, as the research shows most companies have in the past leaned towards job applicants with general skills, rather than specialist server skills.

Close to 40 percent of survey respondents said their recruitment focused on “IT generalists,” thanks to the need to develop methodologies for technologies such as automation and software-defined infrastructure.

“The time and resource savings from these new technologies results in a slightly reduced need for server specialists,” Perry said. “The good news is that there remains a need for specialists across both standalone servers and converged and hyperconverged infrastructures.”

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