Virtualization and cloud services are making it easier for companies to shift IT infrastructure operations to service providers, and that is exactly what many organizations are doing.
The trend is most prevalent among small and midsize companies, many of which are shutting down internal systems and shifting IT workloads to external providers because they want to save money and because they're concerned that it will become difficult to find people with the skills necessary to run data centers.
Large public- and private-sector organizations have been consolidating data centers for years by better optimizing in-house operations; the federal government, for example, is shutting down hundreds of data centers. But most of those enterprises only use cloud services at the margins.
"We are definitely seeing a trend away from in-house data centers toward external data centers, external provisioning," said Gartner analyst Jon Hardcastle.
Insurer OneAmerica is transferring its data center operations to a service provider because it's concerned that one day it won't be able to replace the experts who run its vital systems, said CIO Gene Berry.
By June, the company expects to complete the transfer of all of its IT services to T Systems North America, while cutting the size of its internal data center to 2,000 square feet from 25,000 square feet. The in-house facility will mostly support networking and will be managed by T Systems.
OneAmerica once employed about 65 people in its data center and used about 18 technologies. In some cases, only one or two people had the expertise to maintain specialized systems. "That gave us a lot of concern long-term," said Berry. "We didn't have the ability to hire backups."
Hagen Wenzek, CTO at IPG Mediabrands, which manages Interpublic Groups media assets, also cited concerns about potential brain drain as a reason for shifting management of the company's SQL Server and SharePoint systems to managed services provider Avanade.
"I can't hire enough experts willing to work for a media company," said Wenzek, noting that most people with the skills he needs would rather work for tech vendors.
Avanade boosted the performance of the Microsoft technology that IPG Mediabrands uses and improved delivery of reports, said Wenzek. IPG Mediabrands has since shifted the focus of its IT hiring efforts to recruiting business analysts who can work with data and visualization tools, he added.
Hank Seader, managing principal of the Uptime Institute, said that it takes a "certain set of legacy skills, a certain commitment to the less-than-glorious career fields to make data centers work, and it's hard to find people to do it."
Do in-house data centers have a future? "I think only [at] the really large companies," said Berry, "[at] smaller companies, no."
Meanwhile, the closing of data centers has become a significant concern for IT professionals. Jobs with the best career paths are moving from data centers to fast-growing service providers.
For instance, IT hosting company Rack-space plans to hire 1,000 new employees over the next two years. In the 2012 Rackspace annual report, executives told investors that demand is growing in part because smaller companies lack the IT staff to manage infrastructure operations and don't want to buy new equipment.
