Big enterprises around the world are losing $258 million, nearly 5 percent of the global revenue, per year due to lack of cloud expertise, as per a Rackspace commissioned report in collaboration with the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE academics). The report named – The Cost of Cloud Expertise, comprises findings of discussions on current and future trends in cloud expertise amongst 950 IT decision makers and 950 IT experts around the world.
As per the report, 65% of IT professionals said that proper cloud insight could bring greater innovation to their organizations. About 71% of IT decision makers reported loss of revenue due to absence of cloud expertise.
42% of key decision makers believed that their organizations are lagging the ability to deploy cloud due to lack of skills. Nearly 71% believed increasing the investment in their workforce to get over the challenges of cloud computing.
“While the rise of Artificial Intelligence 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 organizations must have a strategy to access the expertise needed. Those that don’t will struggle to be competitive and innovative,” said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace.
Around half of the respondents reportedly saw positive ROI by using the cloud, with further 39% expecting positive ROI from the cloud deployment in future.
While the IT pros and decision makers had positive reviews for deploying cloud, they were apparently disappointed at not being able to harness it fully as well. 44% of them were reported to be spending more time in managing cloud than they had expected.
However, most of the IT pros (84%) said that their cloud ROI would increase with deeper cloud expertise.
Around half of the IT decision makers also said that they find difficulties in the recruitment of right talent for managing the cloud of their organizations.
46% of IT decision makers found it hard to recruit the right talent, especially for migration project management, cloud security and native cloud app deployment, to help manage their organization’s clouds. The competition in industry (33%), inability in offering competitive salary (30%) and sufficient training (25%), are the main barriers to recruitment.
Also read: Rackspace to acquire Datapipe to expand its multi-cloud management capabilities
Rackspace and LSE academics have advised organizations to split the IT function into separate streams, develop cloud skills strategy, and assess the cloud ecosystem.