- Nearly seven in 10 (68%) IT professionals believe they could be bringing greater innovation to their organisation with the right cloud insights
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| Rackspace held a seminar in Singapore where it shared the details of the survey. According to Engates, 12% of Australian respondents said it is easy to hire the right expertise, compared to none of the Hong Kong respondents, and 4% of Singapore respondents. The survey also noted that 38% of Australian companies and 38% of Hong Kong companies are struggling to keep pace with cloud technologies. In Singapore, the majority of companies are struggling, with 58% of Singapore respondents saying they are struggling to keep up with evolving cloud technologies. |
Large enterprises in the Singapore region could be losing out on revenue as 82% of IT decision makers say that they lack cloud expertise. This comes as large enterprises across the world are losing out on US$258,188,279* a year as a result of a cloud skills gap, according to a new report** commissioned by Rackspace in collaboration with LSE academics.
The study also found that this lack of expertise is stifling creativity, with 68% of IT professionals saying they could bring greater innovation to their organisation with the right cloud insight***. Beyond innovation and growth, 58% of IT decision makers believe a lack of skills is causing a lag in their organisation’s ability to deploy cloud platforms. In addition, 70% believe they need to invest more in their workforce to meet the developmental challenges of cloud computing.
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace, summarised the challenge as "everybody expects everything to move at the speed of light." People are needed today to deliver on scale, scope and speed - the need to procure and provision more servers and services cheaply and easily to meet increased demand; the need to bring new services to lines of business constantly, aand the need to respond quickly to changing market dynamics and customer needs, he said.
He stated, “While the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation may cause some to think that human insight is less important, our report shows that this is not the case. With technology and the cloud now underpinning business transformation, the growing technology skills gap means organisations must have a strategy to access the expertise needed. Those that don’t, will struggle to be competitive and innovative.”
The Cost of Cloud Expertise report looks at the wider implications of the cloud skills gap, and provides a route for businesses to tackle the realities of modern IT and the resulting skills gap. Consisting of research from 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT professionals – as well as in-depth conversations with IT leaders – in large enterprises around the world, the study uncovered trends in cloud expertise.
The realities of modern IT
IT decision makers are seeing the benefits of moving all or part of their IT estate to the cloud. In fact, 36% of respondents say their organisation has already seen a positive return on investment (ROI) on using the cloud, with a further 56% expecting the cloud to deliver positive ROI in the future.
Despite the benefits, both IT professionals and IT decision makers appear frustrated at not being able to use the cloud to its full potential, with Rackspace noting that enterprises need to be able to optimise operations across multiple clouds, dynamically manage complexity, solve security challenges, and improve performance:
- Four in 10 IT professionals are spending more time than they expected managing daily cloud operations
- Six in 10 (62%) of IT decision makers acknowledge that a lack of expertise is holding their business back
- Three quarters (74%) of IT professionals said that deeper cloud expertise within their organisation would help it increase the cloud’s ROI
Most sought-after cloud skills
More than half of IT decision makers (58%) find it hard to recruit the right talent to help manage their organisation’s clouds. Migration project management (44%), cloud security (43%) and native cloud app development (34%) are the skills IT decision makers find rarest globally, Engates observed. Ironically, companies are willing to pay more globally for other skills like database management (44%) and service management (35%), though there is an agreement that cloud security is important, he said.
"You get the sense that people are having sleepless nights," he said. "Hiring the right expertise is tough."
The main barriers to recruitment were:
- Industry competition (48%)
- The inability to offer sufficient training (43%)
- Roles the company focuses on are not appealing as they are mainly on maintenance (35%)
- Company culture not being attractive enough for new recruits (35%)
Looking at what IT pros seek in a new role may provide some pointers to businesses in the competition for workers. While salary and benefits are the top priority (72%), having an opportunity to progress in the company (64%) and access to learning and training opportunities (46%) were also highly rated, showing that businesses must think broader than pay rates to secure top talent.
However, with 66% of IT decision makers looking to increase their organisation’s cloud usage in the next five years, and 64% saying that retaining talent is a concern, the challenges associated with recruitment are likely to increase. This will only be heightened with the majority of IT decision makers (88%) saying that it takes “a number of weeks or more” to train new hires, and 34% stating that “months” of training and on-boarding are required.
Will Venters, Assistant Professor of information systems at LSE, said: “Put simply, cloud technology is a victim of its own success. As the technology has become ubiquitous among large organisations – and helped them to wrestle back control of sprawling physical IT estates – it has also opened up a huge number of development and innovation opportunities. However, to fully realise these opportunities, organisations need to not only have the right expertise in place now, but also have a cloud skills development strategy to ensure they are constantly evolving their IT workforce and training procedures in parallel with the constantly evolving demands of cloud. Failure to do so will severely impede the future aspirations of businesses in an increasingly competitive digital market.”
Rackspace and LSE recommend that organisations:
Split the IT function
Conceptually dividing IT functions into two parts will allow businesses to focus on the dual priorities of business-focused digital innovation and operations-focused innovation.
Develop a cloud skills strategy
Every enterprise IT executive should adopt a cloud skills strategy, which will map current skills in the organisation, map future innovation trajectories and changes (both within the business and in cloud), and match these with realistic market analysis of the available talent pool.
Make a full assessment of the cloud ecosystem
Organisations should adopt an ecosystem approach to the provision of basic cloud services (for example pooling risk by relying on providers). As a result, the dual challenge of both constantly improving and significantly innovating can be improved by relying on a balanced pool of skills and competencies both within and beyond the organisational boundary.
Mariano Mamertino, EMEA economist at global job site Indeed, commented: “Finding, attracting and retaining tech talent is critical to business survival, and yet it is increasingly competitive for companies to find the technical talent they need as demand surges for such skillsets. Our data shows that there is a global mismatch between the cloud roles advertised versus those being searched by IT professionals, which could accelerate the growth of a cloud skills gap. As this new report spotlights, there is both a financial and innovation gap to be plugged here for businesses globally.”
The advantage of working with a managed cloud provider is that it can be more cost-effective for companies than managing the cloud themselves, Engates said. According to the survey, 53% of IT decision makers globally said the ROI generated from cloud services has increased since they began working with a managed services provider. "They don't let a lack of cloud expertise hold them back – they're not going to put their company at risk, their revenue at risk through a lack of expertise," he said.
Interested?
Read the 2017 Cost of Cloud Expertise Report
*Calculation: (average global revenue of respondent organisations ÷ 100) multiplied by average percentage of global annual revenue lost due to a lack of cloud expertise. Calculation in numbers: (5,254,875,750 ÷ 100) x 4.91330891330891 = $258,188,279.
**This research report was conducted by Rackspace in collaboration with LSE academics and sponsorship from Intel. With the support of the independent research house Vanson Bourne, Rackspace conducted 1,900 interviews with respondents from the UK, US, Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong between the months April-May 2017. The respondent pool comprised of 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT pros from organisations that used the cloud. All respondent organisations had more than 1,000 employees from both the public and private sectors. Fifty IT decision makers and 50 IT pros participated from each of three Asia-Pacific locations: Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
In addition to the survey, a team of LSE academics conducted extensive research into the current debate within academia, and the trade press, on cloud computing, process automation, and digital skills. They also, during June-July 2017, conducted a series of interviews with eight global enterprises within the target demographic for the project. A further ten interviews were conducted by a consulting company. Enterprises were given the option of anonymity to allow more candid responses.
***This is based on those using both public, private and hybrid cloud.
I would want to see their data.
ReplyDeleteHappy to pass your enquiry on to Rackspace but not sure how they can get in touch with you as your Google+ profile isn't public - should I share your gmail address?
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