Is the Cloud Skills Gap Stalling Digital Transformation? 

As organisations around the world navigate the cloud era, a lack of skilled professionals may be delaying their digital transformation initiatives. 

That’s according to cloud solutions provider SoftwareONE, which found that the cloud skills shortage is delaying digital transformation projects by an average of five with a third of organisations experiencing delays of up to a year. 

The findings come as part of SoftwareOne’s Cloud Skills Report, which surveyed 500 IT decision-makers 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 surveyed also believe that their team is being negatively impacted by the gap, while over two-thirds rapport has their workload increased within the last twelve months. 

Almost half have had also application performance issues and outages due to the shortage, while a third have missed KPIs on delivering new innovations to the business or been forced to limit their use of the cloud altogether.

“For companies who want to accelerate their digital transformation," said Craig Thomson, senior vice president, of cloud & application services at SoftwareOne. 

"Closing the cloud skills gap is critical. We have seen our clients innovate faster through cloud and application mastery while reducing their risk profile."

Investing in cloud

Despite the impact of the cloud skills shortage, almost all respondents agreed that investing in cloud-managed services will be a priority in the next 12 months. 

They were also 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, almost all of those surveyed said attracting tech talent would be a top priority in their organisation in the coming year.

“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.