Today, most companies leverage cloud innovation and AI-powered autonomy in their business process, resulting in the demand for the latest cloud skills. Companies that take a cloud-first approach realize that the success of their migration journey depends on the synergy between technological advancement, best technology talent, and cloud-powered talent management. According to the NASSCOM report, India is ranked third in the world with 608,000 cloud professionals and is expected to grow at 24 percent CAGR by 2025. This talent pool is expected to grow nearly 2.5 times to reach 1.5 million by 2025.
Cloud Approach for Business
Gartner predicts that the cloud will be essential to business growth by 2028, with cloud computing essential for sustaining competitiveness. A cloud approach offers businesses several benefits, such as reduced costs, greater flexibility, and faster invention. Businesses can do more with cloud technology as it accelerates their digital efforts. In addition, many major organizations are adopting a multi-cloud strategy to achieve flexibility and accelerated transformation.
Despite the significant time investment required to migrate, the benefits of cloud adoption are extensive. The VP of EMEA at Dynatrace, Michael Allen, emphasizes the importance of optimizing cloud environments to maximize benefits. Modern cloud ecosystems, he notes, are becoming increasingly complex, creating challenges for CIOs to manage the data explosion from cloud-native technology stacks. To overcome these challenges, businesses are turning to global systems integrators and consultancies that use AI and automation to streamline tasks, allowing internal teams to focus on high-value, innovative work.
CloudThat CEO Bhavesh Goswami says, “Cloud is being seen as a necessity as the business space is experiencing changes at break-neck speed, and the consumer demand is also at an all-time high. To meet these expanding needs, CEOs understand that cloud technology enables innovation and agility, allowing their organizations to stay competitive.”
About 95 percent of companies incorporate environmental, social, and governance considerations into critical financial decisions, making the cloud an essential tool. The World Cloud Report - Financial Services from research institute Capgemini shows that cloud providers are working on methods to monitor and report emissions, allowing for a thorough understanding of a firm's environmental impact.
Skills Gap
Since its inception, Cloud Computing has proven to be very beneficial to businesses looking for flexibility in their IT operations. Cloud services offer impressive scalability, agility, cost-effectiveness and wide availability. Demand for the cloud is at an all-time high, and businesses are planning to migrate their applications and data from on-premise data centers to the cloud.
The skills gap is the difference between the current capabilities of your employees and those of the top 10 percent of the workforce. It is the combination of know-how, new technology, and modern infrastructure architecture that helps drive innovation and enables companies to dramatically gain market share. The bigger the gap, the more likely the company will no longer achieve its competitive goals—unless you learn, acquire, or improve specific skills.
For example, Kubernetes (an open-source system for deploying and managing containerized applications) is widely considered to have crossed the chasm into mainstream adoption. Microservices architecture and Kubernetes are native to the cloud and together enable significant cost reductions and improved service delivery. In short – your applications perform better, and your end users are happier. However, the native cloud has yet to be adopted in many industries.
In addition to moving to cloud-native approaches, companies are moving toward a hybrid cloud model to reduce costs, enable more data-intensive applications (such as machine learning), and deliver faster service improvements to customers. The Kubernetes and Cloud-native Operations report revealed that 83 percent of respondents use a hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure. Ask, and you'll see combinations of bare metal, virtual machines, and Kubernetes running on top of the underlying layers of public and private clouds. Both Kubernetes and hybrid clouds require skills that are in short supply in many organizations.
How can organizations close the Skills Gap?
If a small team in the organization is working to use a new technology to solve an existing problem, the excitement will spread throughout the organization. Create opportunities for the team to apply new technologies to new projects. Sometimes, this approach is more effective than employer-mandated training.
Another approach is to partner with a vendor that is intimately familiar with cloud-native technology, multi-cloud deployments, infrastructure automation, and open-source communities. Serving as a trusted advisor, this partner can manage infrastructure or applications for people as they scale. This consultant can guide team members, help them become familiar with specific practices and technologies, and help manage and support the required open-source software.
As cloud-native technologies continue to gain mainstream, smart organizations should work to stay one step ahead of any skills or talent shortages. That's why open-source communities are the best place for innovation to happen. Partnering with the right open-source provider can help your business thrive and keep your business growing.