Like many IT roles upended by cloud computing, automation and other innovations, storage professionals are witnessing a sea change in their careers. The job of the storage administrator or engineer used to require deep knowledge in Fibre Channel networks, Worldwide Port Naming, LUN assignments and many other storage specific terms. There was a dedicated network for storage and another for compute. Yet with the advancement of networking, increased virtualization, and budget constraints, many IT organizations have moved to running storage and compute on one physical network with the use of iSCSI.

As enterprises store more data in the cloud, the job of managing on-prem storage has reduced significantly. Automation and advancements in storage technologies have simplified some of the basic storage tasks. It makes IT leaders wonder: If users and business units can provision their own storage, is there still a need for distinct storage roles? The answer is a little vague -- but assuredly, storage careers are morphing as enterprises focus less on managing physical infrastructure and more on managing data and data lifecycles.

New Storage Roles

Overall, storage IT professionals will find that their traditional duties of implementing and maintaining the hardware and mechanical layer have become less complex and time-consuming given innovations from storage vendors and cloud providers. And with storage now distributed across many systems and clouds, the need is to understand and manage the data contained on the systems -- not the physical storage silos. Here are some ways that storage roles will likely evolve and how storage professionals can maintain successful career paths as IT evolves:

Tips For Storage Pros Navigating a New Career Path

Rather than think that your storage career is over, killed by the Internet, it’s time to flip that message and consider how a storage background is a means to transcend vendor-specific skill sets to a role that cuts across IT and the broader organization. A person with storage know-how could feasibly move into other areas of IT such as data mining, data lake analytics, cloud architects, and big data architects. Because without storage, after all, businesses can’t do much. Data is the future of storage and knowing the construct of the data you have is key to the future of business. Executives at the highest level of any organization understand the power of data in an increasingly competitive, digital world.