The Raritan Blog

SMU’s Data Center Engineering Program Signals the Growing Importance of Data Center Professionals

Paula Alves
March 26, 2014

Southern Methodist University’s upcoming fall 2014 graduate degree program in data center engineering is a clear indication of the need for trained data center professionals in the marketplace.   According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, the data center operations workforce tops 4 million people today and is expected to grow to more than two million by 2018.  But how many of them are formally trained in data center operations best practices?  While traditionally data centers have been run by IT staff, they have now evolved to a point where they require specialization in functional areas such as facilities, infrastructure, and subsystems; data center systems engineering and analytics, and; computer networks, virtualization, security, and cloud computing.