Cloud management skills gap holds back growth

A new study of over 800 IT professionals across the US, UK and Germany finds that 72 percent of mid-size companies report a lack of cloud management skills as being a barrier to their growth.

The study from Parallels finds 64 percent of respondents have already implemented a hybrid approach, and 38 percent of all respondents plan to further embrace a hybrid cloud approach in the next year.

Within large enterprises, 18 percent of respondents admit to not getting the most value out of the public cloud and 11 percent across all companies find themselves in a similar position. Among this group of respondents, 41 percent cite concerns over the complexity of migrating to the public cloud. This challenge is further exacerbated by a lack of in-house cloud expertise (33 percent) and IT recruiting challenges (15 percent).

"While it's true that cloud use is not a 'one size fits all' proposition, it is clear that a hybrid cloud model is preferred by companies, both large and small," says Prashant Ketkar, chief technology and product officer of Parallels' parent company Alludo. "As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, hybrid cloud can be the solution. By using a more incremental cloud adoption approach, supported by easy-to-manage software solutions that are enhanced with automation and security, IT professionals can realize the flexibility and cost savings they want from the cloud, without specialized cloud management expertise."

Hybrid cloud is the most common model for supporting a hybrid workforce. The top advantages, compared to 100 percent public cloud or 100 percent on-premises infrastructure, are: increased flexibility (49 percent), improved security (46 percent), cost savings (45 percent), increased reliability (44 percent), scalability (40 percent).

Part of what's driving a hybrid approach is the need for legacy applications. 96 percent of the IT professionals surveyed say that they currently need legacy Windows and Linux applications, and 49 percent report that they will need to continue to access these legacy applications more than five years from now.

The full report is available on the Parallels site.

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