Data Storage Job Market Trends in 2022

The rising volumes of stored data require increasing management and cybersecurity as well as expanding skills and knowledge among storage professionals. 

Enterprises are looking for personnel to help them store, control, and analyze their massive data stores effectively. 

As job seekers look for data storage positions, these are some of the job-related trends the storage market is seeing:

5 Trends in the Data Storage Job Market

1. In-Demand Data Storage Skills
2. With Increasing Data Comes Increasing Management
3. Competition in the Job Market
4. Data Analytics and Management for Unstructured Data
5. Data Storage Platforms to Know

1. In-Demand Data Storage Skills

A highly valuable skill set for data storage pros is cybersecurity technology or management: although traditionally data storage and cybersecurity were individual sectors of IT, they are beginning to merge more because data is one of the top IT resources to be protected. Security skills include key management, risk management or business continuity planning experience, and protecting information security systems.

With the rise of cyber attacks, data backup and recovery are particularly critical  functions for stored data: possible experience includes managing tape libraries, configuring libraries, implementing RAID in arrays, and creating and managing virtual machines. 

Other useful experience and skill sets include:

• Data replication
• Data archiving
• Database software management
• Familiarity with automation technologies or artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)

Data science and analytics skills are also some of the most important for employees working with information systems. Teams can use big data technologies, like Hadoop and Spark, and data visualization software, like Tableau or Google Data Studio, to better understand and apply their stored data. 

Also read: Enterprise Data Storage Predictions

2. With Increasing Data Comes Increasing Management

Enterprises are prioritizing data management technologies like data privacy and data lineage  to contend with their growing stored data, according to Philip Miller, co-founder and co-CEO at Solidatus, a data lineage company. 

“We’re going to see a fundamental shift in the way firms think about and manage data this year, not only because of issues like data privacy and secure cloud data management, but simply because there is so much data that firms can leverage to make better and more informed decisions,” Miller said. 

“In fact, 90% of the data that’s available in the world today was created in the last two years and currently over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created each day, so the heightened focus on data privacy and capabilities, like data lineage, is certainly warranted, and we expect the adoption of these types of solutions — and the personnel that supports them — to increase as the year progresses.”

3. Competition in the Job Market

Employers are finding it difficult to hire and retain top talent during the Great Resignation, and this will extend into at least the beginning of 2022: one in four employees plan to resign from their position in 2022, according to a survey of over 1,000 American workers.

Data industry employers need to up their recruiting game and make concentrated efforts to develop employees. The storage market will see the same competition for talent, according to Debra Maranta, COO at Odaseva, a Salesforce data management platform.

“The storage space will continue its trend of rapid growth in 2022, driving increased competition for hiring top talent,” Maranta said. “This, combined with the current frenzied job market, means storage companies must adopt innovative recruitment efforts. They must also be agile in adjusting to changing employee expectations.”

Enterprises across storage also need to focus on retaining workers, according to Maranta. 

“Employee retention should also be top of mind for every leader,” she said. “As with other industries, the ongoing pandemic is prompting tech companies to not only re-evaluate hybrid working arrangements for employees, but also how to best support them in terms of their physical and emotional well-being.”

4. Data Analytics and Unstructured Data Management

Around 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, which means it isn’t as easy to sort into structured storage systems, like file systems or databases. Unstructured data includes enterprise output like emails, Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data, and mobile device data. 

Potential data employees have the chance to show their skills in data management and analytics to apply unstructured stored data in a way that benefits their organization, according to Krishna Subramanian, COO, co-founder, and president of Komprise, an unstructured data management provider. 

“Many surveys and pundits are talking about the dire need for data scientists and data analytics skills across both IT and business departments,” Subramanian said. 

“While this is true, specifically, an understanding of how to bring the 80% of data that is unstructured into data workflows to extract value from them for data science projects is the critical need and opportunity today. This requires an understanding of how to optimize across different file types to search, curate, mobilize, and leverage unstructured data for AI and ML projects that their business counterparts require to compete today.”

Also read: Managing Unstructured Data Across Hybrid Architectures

5. Data Storage Platforms to Know

These are some of the key players in the data storage market, including some of their  specialties:

• Red Hat — software-defined storage, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)
• NetApp — all-flash arrays, object storage, software-defined storage
• Pure Storage — all-flash storage
• IBM — hybrid cloud storage, file storage, object storage
  Intel — solid-state drives (SSDs), optane persistent memory
• Google Cloud — enterprise cloud storage
• Microsoft Azure — Blob storage (object storage)

Major data storage enterprises currently hiring for many positions include: 

• Microsoft 
• Dell Technologies
• AWS
• NetApp
• IBM
• Red Hat
• Pure Storage
• Google
• Nutanix
• Intel

Read next: Top 5 Data Storage Companies Hiring