The Cloud Talent Crisis: Skills Shortage Drives Up Costs, Risks

Organizations often struggle with cloud speed, cost, and risk because they lack skilled talent. This can cause deployment delays, inefficient use of resources, overspending, and unoptimized infrastructure, leading to unexpected spend.

Security vulnerabilities and compliance issues also increase, raising the risk of data breaches and legal penalties.

Overall, this talent gap hampers effective cloud management, resulting in slower performance, higher costs, and increased risks for businesses.

A recent HashiCorp survey of nearly 1,200 IT professionals worldwide found avoidable cloud spending was a challenge for 91% of this year's respondents.

The largest waste factors for organizations, after lack of needed skills, are the overprovisioning of resources (40%) and idle/underused resources (35%).

The report also revealed lower-maturity organizations lack the resources to be vigilant about their infrastructure. 

The skills shortage is pervasive across all organizations, but it is more acute in those of lower maturity.

Daniel Marashlian, co-founder and CTO of security and compliance automation platform Drata, said organizations are tackling the need for skilled cloud talent with a few key strategies.

"They're boosting their current employees' skills through training programs and cloud certifications, helping their team stay up to date with the latest technologies," he explained.

Related:IT Pros Lack Time, Support to Learn Vital Cloud Computing Skills

On the hiring front, they're focusing on bringing in people with existing cloud experience and offering competitive salaries and top-tier benefits to attract top talent.

Marashlian said these strategies help ensure that organizations have the skilled professionals needed to manage their cloud programs effectively, build strong platform teams, and keep their operations running smoothly.

"By investing in both upskilling and strategic hiring, they can address the talent gap and support their cloud initiatives," he said.

The Advantages of Platform Teams

The HashiCorp survey found highly mature organizations, which accounted for only 8% of the respondents, are responding to ongoing shortages of skilled technical staff by scaling platform teams, presenting infrastructure-as-code capabilities as standardized shared services, and implementing internal developer platforms to maximize the impact of their staff's expertise.

HashiCorp Vice President of Revenue and Marketing Chris Van Wesep explained that platform teams allow organizations to more easily manage infrastructure and speed development.

They foster this by creating standardizing workflows for use across teams, incorporating corporate governance and best practices.

Related:How AI Is Poised to Upend Cloud Networking

"This means more shared resources, fewer engineers being needed for infrastructure, and less time spent managing that infrastructure," he said.

With nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents reporting a shortage of skilled staff, organizations can do more with less.

Wesep cautioned that the lack of skilled talent reverberates throughout an organization, affecting everything from security to the ballooning of cloud spending.

Marashlian said he agreed that not having enough skilled staff causes a lot of cloud waste, including allocating resources poorly, using services inefficiently, and not monitoring or managing things properly.

This leads to overprovisioning, underutilized resources going unnoticed, higher costs, and bad design.

He recommended that companies invest in training their staff, hire experienced professionals, and use automation.

"It's crucial to set up governance frameworks, conduct regular audits, and use cost management solutions in the FinOps [financial operations] space to better help measure and alert on spend," he added.

Cloud Talent and Security

When it comes to security, respondents at low-maturity firms cited a shortage of necessary staff and skills as one of their key issues.

"Cloud complexity is growing by the day, and with it, the challenge of responding to security threats," he said. "Organizations need more skilled engineers to deal with attacks — or even notice them."

He noted that phishing attacks, password leakage, and third-party attacks — the three biggest threats reported in this year's survey — are even more dangerous without skilled, well-resourced personnel.

Of the organizations classified as cloud-mature, 67% use platform teams to maximize staff expertise.

"Not only do platform teams help manage cloud estates, but they also address the ongoing skills shortage that has long plagued enterprise cloud adoption," Wesep said.

These organizations rely on platform teams to enable consistent and accelerated execution of many key functions, from standardizing cloud infrastructure strategy and building in security and compliance to risk management and tracking site reliability.

"For me, cloud waste is the biggest concern," he said. "It means more money goes where it shouldn't, less money is available to hire talented staff, and fewer resources are available to that staff."

Eamonn O'Neill, co-founder and CTO of Lemongrass, said some successful high-maturity organizations deploy strategies based on DevOps-centric ways of working to overcome staffing challenges and build successful platform teams.

"This approach can result in a faster pace of innovation, better mapping of features with customer requirements, and additional cost savings opportunities," he explained.

Some components of this strategy include working backwards from the customer, organizing teams around products, keeping development teams small, and reducing risk through iteration.

"There is a clear correlation between a lack of skilled talent and a lack of cloud maturity," O'Neill said. "High-maturity organizations tend to establish cloud principles and then strictly adhere to them."

O'Neill added that FinOps is a new concept for most IT staff, but it is something that applies to anyone who builds or operates workloads on the cloud.

He cautioned that a lack of understanding in this area can create some of the horror stories of overspend that make the news.

"However, with some training and a good set of controls, this variable spend can be one of the greatest enablers of innovation in IT," O'Neill said.