Cloud skills gap causes 32% of businesses to miss financial objectives while delaying digital transformation projects by five months, SoftwareOne survey finds

The SoftwareOne Cloud Skills Survey canvassed the opinions of 500 IT decision-makers (ITDMs) from the UK, Benelux, North America, and Australia to understand how the cloud-skills shortage is impacting IT teams and how they plan to combat it in 2024. Almost all (95%) of the IT decision-makers believe their team has been negatively impacted by the cloud skills gap, while almost two-thirds (62%) report having their workload increase in the last 12 months.

When looking at how the cloud skills gap had impacted the teams' work, the survey found that vital areas were being missed. 43% of respondents noted their organisations have struggled to keep up to date with security and compliance, 41% have had application performance issues and outages and 38% have missed KPIs on delivering new innovations to the business. One-third even said they had to restrict their use of the cloud altogether.

When looking to the future, the IT-decision makers were confident that the cloud skills gap within their organisation would improve in the years to come, with 87% saying they believe it will get better in the next five years. In the interim, the survey respondents view investing in cloud managed services as the key to success. Almost all (93%) respondents agree that investing in cloud-managed services will be a priority in the next 12 months, with respondents also claiming that investing in cloud-managed services could increase productivity globally by as much as 156%.

“For companies who want to accelerate their digital transformation, closing the cloud skills gap is critical. We have seen our clients innovate faster through cloud and application mastery while  reducing their risk profile,” stated Craig Thomson, Senior Vice President Cloud & Application Services, SoftwareOne. “Our research into the cloud skills gap shows how much is at stake. The majority of organisations see cloud managed services as a crucial way to bridge the gap, with the option of scaling back these resources as they build their own internal capabilities for the future,” added Thomson.