Written by Joe Kozlowicz on Tuesday, March 7th 2017
If you’re like many modern organizations, you’re looking towards a “cloud-first” IT strategy, where new workloads are architected with cloud deployment in mind, and older infrastructure is redesigned for the cloud as time and requirements allow. But you may also face a common obstacle to these goals: a cloud skills gap among your IT staff.
One Gartner survey found that 59% of IT professionals thought their organization was not prepared to transition to a digital business approach. Another study from the Center for Cyber Safety and Education found that there will be a deficit of 1.8 million cybersecurity professionals by the year 2022. Rackspace and LinkedIn found that AWS, Azure, and DevOps job vacancies have increased significantly in the past year, while Docker vacancies increased a whopping 341%. An ISACA report claims that it takes three months months to fill 55% of information security vacancies, and six months or longer for an additional 32%.
Meanwhile, Intel security discovered that 36% of organizations lack cloud skills, but are still continuing on their adoption path. Only 15% of the 2,000 surveyed IT professionals claimed they had no cloud skill shortage.
It’s clear that many enterprises and midsize businesses may require help managing these new cloud environments — especially when departments are adopting shadow cloud and shadow IT services at an increasing rate, as the Intel report corroborates.
A managed cloud partner can help fill in virtually any skill gap on your team, while allowing your crew more time to attend to other tasks related to your core business. While the additional expense may be difficult for your finance department to come to terms with, adding a managed service easily justifies itself when comparing lifetime TCO and ROI to in-house management, especially if you lack key skills on your team.
Do your admins know VMware, but have a hard time with security? Not sure how to design your network topology for reliable cloud services? Able to manage your cloud servers but no time for monitoring? Or just need help lifting and shifting applications? Whatever your skill gap, a managed cloud partner can keep your environment 100% available and secure.
If you factor in the salary of a potential new staff member, plus the potential cost of any downtime, the addition of managed cloud services becomes an attractive alternative to remain cloud-first, maintain uptime, and add security to your cloud environment. When it takes a full quarter to simply hire a cybersecurity pro, it can often be easier to choose a managed cloud partner instead, even as a stopgap.
Originally Appearing on Green House Data