Prior to the late 1990s, physical storage was always dedicated to individual servers, and storage management was a part-time job of either the system administrator or the database administrator (DBA). But with the advent of storage shared over networks for many servers, a change in approach was required. This change has begun to appear across the industry: the introduction of dedicated storage teams managing the storage resources as a service to the system administrators and DBAs who used to do the work. The "necessary" part of the job description — configuring, monitoring and troubleshooting the storage network and devices — has been broadly implemented across larger organizations. The opportunity side, what Gartner terms full empowerment, has not. And yet it is the opportunity side that promises dramatically improved costs, availability, recoveries, business flexibility and more. Getting to the opportunity is a journey through organization and people changes that track and mirror advances and deployments in storage technology, management and applications, but require significant investment and effort in their own right. This Spotlight takes a look at the journey and evolution to fully empowered storage teams — why, what, who and when — from several perspectives. It is required reading for top-level managers, since organizational change needs to be supported from the highest ranks in the organization, as well as for the storage organization, higher-level IT management and anyone who has a concern about staffing, skills, training, retraining, and so on. "Staffing the Dedicated Storage Team" — Storage managers should look beyond the obvious to secure all of the critical skill sets for the team that creates and manages a storage utility. By Robert E. Passmore and April Adams 
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