Tech pros in Singapore face merged roles, shrunken budgets

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan

The roles of technology professionals have converged yet budgets remain focused less on emerging technologies and more on infrastructure, hybrid IT, expanding their charter from operations to optimisation, a report from SolarWinds shows.

As cloud computing continues to grow, tech pros say they are increasingly prioritising areas like hybrid infrastructure management, application performance management (APM), and security management to optimise delivery for the organisations they serve.

“In our seventh year of the IT Trends Report, we see the effects of hybrid IT in breaking down traditional siloes and bringing core competencies across on-premises and cloud environments together,” said Joe Kim, EVP and global CTO at SolarWinds. “Especially now, when organisations worldwide are facing new challenges and uncertainty, we must take this reality seriously, focusing on skills development and readiness in key areas like security, cloud infrastructure, and application monitoring.”

Kim said technology professionals must work alongside business leaders to meet organisational goals while also investing time and energy into cultivating the necessary skills to drive business success.

The report found that the top three technologies influencing firms’ staffing needs are cloud computing(46%), security and compliance (37%), and hybrid IT (29%).

Only one-third (34%) name emerging technologies—like AI, edge, microservices, and containers—as the biggest influence on staffing needs.

Also, the top three ways tech pro roles have changed over the past three to five years are the need to retrain existing staff (44%), assumed additional non-IT responsibilities (35%), and increased work week hours (33%).

However, tech pros are experiencing barriers Including lack of budget/resources (34%) and unclear or shifting priorities (21%).

Further, 64% are spending more time managing apps and services rather than infrastructure and hardware. This represents a “monumental shift” in the strategic importance of applications to the modern business.

According to SolarWinds, tech pros need to develop nontechnical skills to operate within the universal language of IT reality where cross-functional and business-level communication is necessary.

The nontechnical skills tech pros feel are most critical to successfully manage today’s modern IT environments include people management (58%), risk assessment (48%), and interpersonal communication (47%).