DCN July 2016 | Page 36

IT Personnel HUMAN RESOURCES Owen Ashby of Cognisco highlights the integral role data centres now have and how this will grow, the need for experienced people with great technical skills to manage and work in data centres, and what companies need to do to attract the right people to the industry – and the risks they face if they don’t. T he seemingly unstop pable acceleration in demand for global data has propelled the data centre industry into one of the most important and fastest growing areas of the economy. Frost and Sullivan 36 predicts a 16 per cent growth in the European data centre market by 2018 as a result of the growth in enterprise cloud computing, content-heavy applications and the machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity needed for the Internet of Things (IoT). Although this projected growth is very positive, there are major challenges. Whilst data centres are the engine rooms of many global businesses today, their effectiveness depends on the availability of experienced, certified and competent network and data centre managers and engineers.