In today’s enterprise IT environment, the traditional IT professional that would be shuffling through cables, managing and racking up physical servers, and interacting with networking equipment via a command line interface is disappearing.
The role is either evolving or needs to evolve to a professional that understands the challenges, complexities and business value of technologies and concepts such as big data, cloud-based infrastructure and services, containers, software defined networking and network virtualization, just to mention a few.
The computing, storage and networking components of data-centric enterprises can nowadays be deployed, configured and managed via code. This allows new sets of automation possibilities and of quick response and turnaround times for delivering services to the enterprise.
The move towards a software-defined IT infrastructure generates many changes in the way IT management and monitoring is carried out. Add to this, the fact that many enterprises are relying ever more on data to generate insights, products and monitor their efficiency, which can only be carried out if their IT infrastructure is flexible enough to provide computation, storage and communication capabilities in the right places and at the right time.
All of this implies that computer networking fundamentals and IT management principles have to be looked at with a new light in the institutions that educate enterprise IT professionals in order to meet the current and future needs of modern enterprises.
The way that data management principles are taught should be revisited, since cloud services, big data and analytics have brought about new challenges in areas such as information security, data governance and risk management.
Additionally, the modern enterprise IT professional will very likely interact or be directly involved with teams of people building new products or seeking new insights from data or planning for major initiatives where it is no longer feasible to just pass on to the IT team the requirements that need to be satisfied to provide the infrastructure for every project or initiative.
Thus, curricula for this IT professional should also provide a good degree of business oriented skills in areas such as project management, team building and effective communication skills.
At Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, our MS degree in Enterprise Data Systems is designed to prepare professionals that can manage, design, and deploy the infrastructure that supports the modern digital enterprise.
