This article draws on findings from the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2020 (conducted December 2019; n=227 U.S. and Canadian technology practitioners, managers and directors) and the DevOps Institute Upskilling 2020: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report (n=1,300 respondents). Original coverage appeared on devops.com.
The Skills Crisis Hitting Enterprise IT
As enterprises accelerate adoption of cloud computing, hybrid IT architectures and DevOps practices, traditional departmental siloes are dissolving — but they are being replaced by a new set of pressures: a widening skills gap, strained training budgets and an incoming workforce that many senior practitioners believe is not yet ready for modern distributed environments.
The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2020 — conducted just before the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the operational context for IT teams globally — captures these pressures in sharp relief. Its findings highlight a workforce already stretched thin, facing unclear priorities and insufficient resources to keep pace with technology change.
How Enterprise Technology Roles Are Changing
When respondents were asked to identify the top ways their roles were evolving, three themes dominated:
- Retraining existing staff — cited by 43% of respondents as the primary driver of role change.
- Increased on-premises responsibilities — 40% reported expanding scope of infrastructure management, even as cloud adoption grows.
- Longer working hours — 37% said their working week has grown, indicating that headcount is not keeping pace with workload.
At the same time, IT professionals identified the biggest obstacles standing in the way of effective delivery:
- Lack of budget and resources — 36%
- Unclear or shifting priorities — 23%
- Insufficient training for personnel — 12%
These constraints compound each other: when budgets are tight, training is cut first, which deepens the skills gap, which in turn increases workload on experienced staff.
New Entrants Aren’t Ready for Modern IT Environments
A particularly striking finding concerns the readiness of new technology professionals entering the workforce. According to the survey:
- 48% of respondents said new hires do not arrive equipped with the skills needed to manage modern, distributed IT environments.
- Only 28% believe new entrants do possess the necessary skills.
This perception gap has practical consequences. When nearly half of hiring managers doubt the readiness of incoming talent, the burden of upskilling falls entirely on the organization — precisely when budgets are under pressure and teams are already stretched.
Soft Skills Are Now Table Stakes for DevOps Success
Technical capability alone is no longer sufficient in cross-functional DevOps and cloud environments. Both the SolarWinds and DevOps Institute surveys converge on the growing importance of interpersonal and organizational skills.
The SolarWinds survey identified the following non-technical competencies as increasingly critical:
- Project management — 69%
- Interpersonal communication — 57%
- People management — 53%
Yet despite recognizing the importance of communication, only 53% of respondents said they feel comfortable communicating with business leaders when requesting budget for technology purchases or staff training. This hesitancy can create a self-reinforcing cycle: teams that struggle to articulate business value are less likely to secure the investment needed to close their skills gap.
The DevOps Institute Upskilling 2020 report, based on 1,300 global respondents, reinforces this point: more than 50% of enterprises reported challenges managing the people and processes behind DevOps — not just the tooling — and 61% identified interpersonal skills as crucial to DevOps success.
Application Performance Management and Cloud Observability
As IT portfolios shift from on-premises hardware toward cloud and SaaS services, the observability and monitoring skill set required has expanded significantly. Key findings from the SolarWinds survey include:
- 54% of respondents now spend more time managing applications and services than infrastructure and hardware.
- When moving to cloud, 57% use network traffic and network application analysis tools, and 55% use user experience monitoring.
- 52% rely on log analysis for cloud visibility.
- For application performance management (APM), 61% use a combination of native cloud-vendor tools and third-party toolsets — reflecting the reality that no single vendor covers every observability need.
Enterprise-scale organizations show a notably higher reliance on advanced techniques: log analytics adoption reaches 58% at the enterprise tier, and distributed tracing is used by 24% of enterprise respondents — versus much lower rates at smaller organizations. By contrast, only 23% of small businesses reported having no plans to adopt tooling for cloud or SaaS visibility.
Security Management: A Growing Time Commitment
Security is not just a technical concern — it is now a primary time sink for IT professionals at all levels. According to the survey:
- 65% of IT professionals spend at least 10% of their working day on security management activities.
The top security skill areas organizations are prioritizing for development are:
- Network security — 48%
- Security information and event management (SIEM) — 33%
- Backup and recovery — 29%
The emphasis on backup and recovery alongside threat detection reflects a mature, defense-in-depth approach: organizations are investing not only in preventing breaches but in minimizing recovery time when they occur.
Regulatory Compliance Is Expanding IT Headcount Requirements
Compliance obligations are another factor driving up staffing and skills requirements. According to the SolarWinds survey, 46% of respondents said regulatory compliance has fueled the need for additional staff. The regulations with the biggest operational impact were:
- GDPR — 45%
- PCI DSS — 34%
- HIPAA — 34%
The breadth of regulation — spanning data privacy, payment card security and healthcare data — means that no single compliance specialization is sufficient. IT teams operating across industries must maintain working knowledge of multiple regulatory frameworks simultaneously, further straining already limited training budgets.
What IT Leaders Should Take Away
The compounding pressures captured by these surveys point to several practical priorities for IT leaders:
- Budget for internal upskilling programs — With nearly half of hiring managers unconvinced that new entrants are ready, waiting to hire your way out of a skills gap is not a viable strategy. Structured internal training programs for cloud, observability, security and compliance competencies are increasingly necessary.
- Treat soft skills as technical requirements — Project management, cross-team communication and business stakeholder engagement should appear in role descriptions and development plans, not just as nice-to-haves.
- Invest in observability tooling that reduces cognitive load — As environments grow more complex, the right combination of native cloud monitoring and third-party APM tools can reduce the time experienced engineers spend on reactive troubleshooting, freeing capacity for skills development.
- Build a compliance skills matrix — Map your team’s current regulatory knowledge against your actual compliance obligations (GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and others relevant to your sector) to identify targeted training investments.
- Coach IT managers to advocate for budget — The finding that fewer than half of IT professionals feel comfortable requesting technology investment from business leaders is a leadership development gap, not just a communication style issue.
About the Source Data
The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2020 was conducted in December 2019 and is based on responses from 227 technology practitioners, managers and directors from public and private small, mid-size and enterprise businesses in the U.S. and Canada. The DevOps Institute Upskilling 2020: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report drew on approximately 1,300 respondents globally. Both surveys predate the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pressures they document have in many cases intensified since publication.