Shortage of cloud skills costing firms $258B in lost innovation

Large enterprises worldwide are losing out on $258 million per year due to a lack of cloud expertise, according to a new report by Vanson Bourne commissioned by cloud managed services company Rackspace in collaboration with LSE academics and sponsorship from Intel.

The study found that the cloud skills gap is stifling creativity, with two thirds (65 percent) of 950 IT professionals and 950 IT decision makers surveyed worldwide in April and May 2017 saying they could bring greater innovation to their organization with the right cloud insight.

Nearly three quarters (71 percent) of IT decision makers report that their organizations have lost revenue due to a lack of cloud expertise. Beyond innovation and growth, 42 percent of the decision makers think a lack of skills is causing a lag in their organization's ability to deploy cloud platforms.

A majority (71 percent) also think they need to invest more in their workforce to meet the developmental 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," said John Engates, CTO at Rackspace. "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."

IT decision makers are seeing the benefits of moving all or part of their IT estate to the cloud. About half (48 percent) of respondents said their organization has already seen a positive return on investment (ROI) on using the cloud, with a further 39 percent expecting the cloud to deliver positive ROI in the future.