Cloud management skills gap drives hybrid cloud adoption

A lack of cloud management skills could be limiting in-house innovation and the benefits enterprises gain from implementing public cloud exclusively, driving more IT organizations to invest in hybrid cloud environments, according to recent research. 

In one survey, software vendor Parallels polled 805 IT professionals to learn more about how they use cloud resources. The responses showed that a technical skills gap continues to concern many organizations deploying cloud. Some 62% of survey respondents said they viewed the lack of cloud management skills at their organization as a “major roadblock for growth.” According to the results, 33% of respondents pointed to a lack of in-house expertise when trying to get maximum value from their cloud investment. Another 15% survey cited a difficulty finding the appropriate talent.

Separately, Vanson Bourne conducted a survey of 500 IT decision makers to understand how the cloud skill shortage is affecting IT teams. Nearly all (98%) of global organizations surveyed are facing a cloud skills gap, specifically having difficulty finding people with general cloud skills, cloud architectural knowledge, and adapting, monitoring, and troubleshooting for cloud. One-third of respondents said that a cloud skills gap meant they had to “restrict their use of the cloud,” and that “causes a Catch-22 situation where teams can’t learn cloud skills because they can’t use it,” according to the Cloud Skills Report from Vanson Bourne on behalf of software and cloud solutions provider SoftwareOne.

The SoftwareOne survey also found that 41% reported that they had experienced application performance issues and outages because of a cloud skills gap, which has negatively impacted business operations, productivity, and customer experience. Another 38% said that they had missed key performance indicators on delivering new innovations to the business due to the cloud skills shortage. Other effects from the cloud skills shortage include increased workloads for 62% of survey respondents who reported their IT teams can become overburdened and experience an average negative productivity impact of 31%.

“…the current gap of approximately 1.5 million IT professionals worldwide has already made it challenging for small and medium businesses to get the resources they need, driving a need for new innovation and infrastructure solutions,” said Shannon Kalvar, IDC research director, in a statement. Kalvar cited data from IDC’s latest xOps census and forecast.

Skills gap drives hybrid cloud adoption

The Parallels research found that within large enterprises, 18% of respondents admit to not getting the most value out of the public cloud. Across all companies, 11% also find themselves not seeing all the expected benefits of adopting cloud. Within this group, 41% pointed to concerns over the complexity of migrating to the public cloud.

This concern over skills is driving adoption of hybrid cloud, which involves owning and managing a mix of on-premises, private, and public cloud resources as part of the overall IT infrastructure.

According to the Parallels survey, the top five benefits reported for the use of hybrid cloud, compared to 100% public cloud or 100% on-premises infrastructure, are: increased flexibility (49%), improved security (46%), cost savings (45%), increased reliability (44%), and scalability (40%).