How’s Your Cloud Strategy Doing?

When it comes to cloud computing adoption, the numbers really speak for themselves:

96% of organizations already use some form of the cloud
On average, businesses leverage nearly 5 separate clouds
26% of enterprises spend of $6 million per year on public cloud computing
Garner projects the market size & growth services industry at nearly three times the growth of overall IT services through 2022
IDC predicts spending on public cloud services & infrastructure will more than double over the 2019 – 2023 forecast period.

The benefits of cloud computing are real and most companies report gaining agility and scalability benefits from moving to the cloud. Development teams can build and deploy apps much faster than previously done, and Cloud is a perfect environment for DevOps and micro-services, which is how most companies are building new apps.

“What they often found is that they made the incorrect assumption that on-premises skills could translate to the cloud when they did not.”

But Cloud also comes with its own challenges. Many firms initially made the move to the cloud on their own and got a rude surprise. They didn’t understand the cloud and had the wrong ideas for what workloads should be migrated. The result, according to the one IDC study, was more than 40% of companies surveyed moved workloads back on premises after a brief flirtation with the cloud. And, new estimates show that 35% of cloud spending goes to waste due to insufficient cloud cost optimization. What they often found is that they made the incorrect assumption that on-premises skills could translate to the cloud when they did not. Just because you can run a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server didn’t mean you automatically knew how to manage an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance. And while new skills can be learned, there is a learning process to be undertaken.

A 2018 Right Scale survey found that cloud cost optimization is a big priority for large companies all the way down to small businesses. Also, Container adoption may also be contributing to cost optimization issues.

What does this mean for cloud related jobs?

As more and more enterprises drive value from container platforms, infrastructure-as-code solutions, software-defined networking, storage, continuous integration/delivery, and AI, they need people with more niche expertise and deep technological understanding. Anecdotally, many organizations share that getting and keeping talent on board is a challenge as they seek to evolve their use of cloud services. The cloud jobs that are available in the market today are a result of employer demand to drive innovation and are paramount for new business applications and services to the end-user.

In the past three years, job searches for roles related to cloud computing – including cloud infrastructure, cloud security, cloud architect, and cloud engineer – rose nearly 108%! Job searches that included keywords related to the top cloud provider, such as Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS, increased by 223% Employer interest for candidates with cloud computing skills rose 33%. Finally job listings that included these terms in the description rose by 101% over the same time frame.

What this all boils down to is that enterprises of all sizes what to take advantage of the Cloud’s productivity AND price efficiencies, but it’s tricky. You need the right configuration, but most importantly, the right people to make it happen. They are out there and can make a huge impact.