Companies are losing money due to lack of cloud skills
The London School of Economics and cloud host provider, Rackspace conducted a survey with 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros whereby 71% that their company is losing money due to lack of expert cloud knowledge, accounting for 5% of total global revenue.
46% of IT decision makers from the poll admitted that they have difficult recruiting the best candidates to head their cloud projects, with the most frequent lack of skills when searching for the right candidate being migration, native cloud app development and cloud security. It seems as the lack of cloud skills affecting a company’s business is widely known already by decision makers with a whopping 65% saying they could bring greater innovation to their company with the right cloud insight and 85% saying that better expertise would result in them returning on their cloud investment.
This problem doesn’t stop in Europe unfortunately, with the lack of cloud skills being a global issue for companies. Are we facing a shortage of cloud expertise? CTO of Rackspace, John Engates has said that “without access to a solid pool of relevant expertise, organisations’ ability to take full advantage of the benefits offered by the cloud will always be limited”.
It seems that there is more to be done in order to have ‘experts’ of the cloud, especially with the increasing usage of the cloud services in companies, with most companies averaging 8 different cloud services. More training needs to be easily available for IT pros to become efficient in their work as lack of expertise results in more time being used in the working day on managing cloud operations. 50% of executives in intense cloud usage companies stated that 15% or more time is spent managing cloud services.
As said, their needs to be more training focussed on cloud services, as traditional skills that are learnt through training to become a Microsoft MVP or Cisco CCNA such as server management, Windows and Cisco don’t translate to the cloud automatically and therefore IT pros are back to the beginning when it comes to understanding the cloud.