Coping With a Skeleton Crew | Top Considerations

Coping With a Skeleton Crew | Part 12 of AFCOM’s Consider This Series

A combination of factors — the talent crunch, retirements, and the rise of automation — could mean that data centers will soon begin to resemble big-box stores, where it can seem you walk for miles before finding an employee to help you. Personnel are becoming thinner on the ground, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Operating with a skeleton crew is becoming the norm.

Here are five of the top considerations when coping with a skeleton crew.

1. Stop Dreaming About the Good Old Days

Some former athletes like to get together to talk about the good old days when their team overcame difficult obstacles and triumphed over tough opponents. Perhaps one day, retired data center managers will gather to reminisce about the times when they had dozens of employees working for them. That frame of mind might be fine during retirement, but there’s no room for it in the modern data center.

Gone forever are the days when there were large storage, networking, applications, compute, programming, and facilities teams. Even the existence of such teams is in jeopardy as more and more functions converge. The best frame of mind is to accept that skeleton crews are here to stay and find a way to make it work.

2. Prioritize 

In such a climate, some — but not all — data center functions will have to be handed off to cloud providers, colocation facilities, or service providers. Certain core functions must remain in-house. Figure out what those are and how to maximize the skills you already have. Pick the workloads that match up, and gradually let go of much of the rest. Having a skeleton crew means the data center manager must be smart about the tasks, equipment, and applications that stay inside the data center.

3. Automate and Digitize

Japan appeared to have the world at its feet in the 1980s due to the strength of its economy. It subsequently faltered as the result of an aging population and a lack of entry-level workers. But the nation has since responded to become a world leader in automation. It has realized that digitalization and automation can help it overcome its labor shortage.

Data center managers should take a leaf out of the Japanese playbook. The best answer to lack of manpower is to embrace automation and digital transformation. Analytics, artificial intelligence, data center infrastructure management, and other tools can eliminate a lot of manual labor and make the job more tenable over the long run.

4. Consider Outsourcing Maintenance

Agreeing to let outside firms come in and take care of all data center infrastructure maintenance might seem like the beginning of the end, but it might be the right thing to do in some data centers. Many external providers possess plenty of manpower and advanced systems. If staffing remains low and budgets are tight, outsourcing maintenance to someone like Schneider Electric or Vertiv could be cheaper and easier.

In that case, what is the data center manager to do? Just as with using the cloud, someone still must oversee cloud management, and bringing in outside maintenance help still requires planning, prioritization, and general oversight. Coordination and strategy are other areas that require data center know-how. And digitalization and automation initiatives could take years to implement.

5. Rest Assured: You Are Not a Dying Species

A couple of decades ago, power plants were inhabited by hundreds of people. Now there are dozens — in some cases, just a handful. Automation, remote monitoring, and liberal use of vendor and service provider teams have served to reduce internal labor demands — but they can never eliminate the need for internal workers, especially managers.

It’s the same situation in the data center. Yes, the ranks might thin even more, but your insight, technical savvy, and experience are irreplaceable. You might no longer be at the top of the food chain, but neither are you a dying species.

Please keep an eye out for the next release of “Consider This,” which will provide the top five recommendations when improving disaster recovery capabilities.