The Talent Shortage No One's Talking About
While the tech world races ahead with AI, cloud, and edge innovation, there’s a quiet crisis lurking in the background: the shrinking pool of skilled network engineers.
Ask any CIO or infrastructure leader and you’ll hear the same refrain:
“We don’t have enough qualified people to run the networks we already have—let alone the ones we need tomorrow.”
Retirements are rising. Demand is surging. The talent pipeline? Barely trickling. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: we can’t hire our way out of it.
The Consequences of a Human-Bound Network
Manual network operations aren’t just slow—they’re dangerous in today’s digital climate.
Every config change is a potential failure point. Every delay in rollout creates business drag.
And the smaller the team, the greater the risk:
- Longer MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution)
- Higher likelihood of misconfigurations
- Loss of institutional knowledge when senior engineers leave
- Project slowdowns that stall innovation
In this model, the network becomes the bottleneck—not the enabler.
Intelligent Automation Is the Only Scalable Solution. The answer isn’t a bigger team. It’s a smarter foundation.
Intelligent Network Automation (INA) offers a force multiplier for lean IT teams:
- Automatically detects drift and enforces config compliance
- Empowers Tier 1 teams with safe, no-code change tools
- Uses intent-based models to eliminate guesswork
- Enables fast, consistent rollout of network changes—at scale
- Codifies and scales expertise, making critical knowledge available and repeatable to every operator, every time
- Acts as a central repository of critical network knowledge, even if key personnel retires or moves on
Amplify Your People—Don’t Replace Them
Let’s be clear: automation isn’t about cutting heads. It’s about protecting the humans who remain.
With INA, your seasoned engineers don’t spend their days SSH’ing into switches. They focus on:
- Architecture
- Strategic planning
- Innovation
And for junior staff? It’s a path to faster onboarding and safer operations—without requiring 20 years of CLI mastery.
You’re not losing control, you’re gaining consistency, speed, and resilience.
The Enterprise Network Needs a New Operating Model
Hiring more engineers is expensive, slow, and unsustainable.
Training new ones takes years.
But transforming your network operations through intelligent automation?
That’s achievable today—and it unlocks long-term agility, security, and efficiency.
Intelligent network automation isn’t a luxury or a nice to have. It’s the only viable path forward.
As complexity rises and teams shrink, it’s time to let automation do the heavy lifting—so your people can focus on what really matters.
About the Author
Ernest Lefner comes to Gluware with over 20 years of financial services IT Leadership experience. Ernest Lefner has held a variety of roles in his career including an executive role at Ernst & Young, and 13+ years building and leading the Fidelity Investments Network Product Management, Cyber Security Engineering organizations. In addition, Ernest spent 5 years as a change agent driving change across infrastructure at Bank of America and most notably built the Network, Voice, and Security Architecture and Engineering organizations during the insourcing of the network from HP. Ernest has also been a powerful industry presence through co-founding the industry organization known as ONUG (Open Networking Users Group) which is focused on sharing IT experiences between members to help the adoption of complex technology like software-defined infrastructure, Automation, and Cloud. Ernest also spent 12 years in the United States Air Force and is passionate about Veterans causes and gives back to the community through his participation and leadership on the North Texas advisory board for Npower organization focused on free training and transitioning of veterans and underprivileged youth into new careers in IT.
