In order to adopt cloud IaaS and PaaS successfully (and arguably, to adopt SaaS optimally), an organization needs skills. Most of all, it needs technical skills for the whole application lifecycle in the cloud — the ability to architect applications (and their underlying stacks) for the cloud, develop for the cloud, secure the cloud, run and manage and govern the cloud environments and the applications in those environments. The more cloud-natively you can do these things, the better.

If you can’t do these things in cloud-native patterns (often because you’re migrating your legacy), you at least want to try to modernize and cloud-optimize — to leverage PaaS rather than IaaS, to automate everything you reasonably can, and otherwise exploit the cloud capabilities to maximum effectiveness. This, too, requires skills.

Cloud skills needs — and associated “soft skills” and mindset — are needed in infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams and security and risk management (SRM) teams. They’re needed in application teams, data science teams, and other technical end-user teams that exploit cloud services, along with enterprise architecture and other architecture teams. There are also nontechnical skills that have to be built in the appropriate teams — effective cloud sourcing, effective cloud financial management, and so on.

My colleagues and I have previously written that the cloud skills gap has reached a crisis level in many organizations. Organizational timelines for cloud adoption, cloud migration and cloud maturity are being impacted by the inability to hire and retain the people with the necessary qualifications.

There are lots of reasons for the skills gap — insufficient number of trained and experienced people to meet demand, escalating salaries plus a globalized market for talent that results in NYC banks nabbing skilled cloud architects working for enterprises in Iowa or Missouri (or Poland) for NYC banking salaries, and the quality of the opportunities available.

For instance, an increasing number of the technical professionals I talk to care more about good executive support for the cloud program, a cloud team that’s executing well and doing smart things, an opportunity to bring their best selves to work (excellent team management, great colleagues, feeling valued, etc.), and strong belief in the organization’s mission, than they do about pay per se. It isn’t just about pay — but at a lot of slow-moving enterprises where the pay isn’t great, there are also cultural issues that make highly-skilled cloud professionals feel out of place and not valued.

While many organizations are trying to retrain existing I&O personnel especially, these efforts can fail because the DevOps emphasis of successful cloud-optimized or cloud-native adoption results in fundamentally different jobs. Not only does this require the development of strong automation (and thus coding) skills, but it also results in a more project-driven workday,  greater autonomy (but also more self-starting and self-motivation), and more communication and collaboration with application teams and other cloud users. Those who prefer “IT factory work”, solitarily executing repetitive ClickOps tasks driven by service requests, generally don’t enjoy the change in the nature of a job.

Organizations that can’t retain cloud-trained staff often react by leaning more heavily on the people that remain, which jacks up stress levels, leads to resentment, and often turns into a spiral of departures. Contractors can help fill the gap — if the organization is willing to spend the money to hire them.

Many organizations are successfully bridging the gap with consulting (professional services) and managed services (a Gartner survey showed about three-quarters of organizations use such services for at least a portion of their cloud IaaS+PaaS adoption). Many cloud managed services deals include explicit training and gradual handover to the customer’s personnel, allowing the customer to take over bit by bit as their team gets comfortable. However, MSPs, SIs, and other outsourcers are also struggling to fulfill the demand, which leads to both project delays as well as throwing less-qualified bodies into the mix in order to try to meet contractual obligations and grow revenues.

I believe that we are rapidly reaching the point where the skills gap is not only endangering the ability of individual organizations to fulfill their cloud computing ambitions, but where we may begin to see systemic back-off from cloud ambitions, resulting most notably in cancelled or substantially scaled-back cloud migrations as a common market pattern. (Disclaimer: This is a personal statement scribbled while eating lunch. It is not a peer-reviewed Gartner position.) Also, note that in no way am I claiming that this is likely to lead to repatriation!

Organizations that are late cloud adopters were already more hesitant about going to the cloud in the first place. They tend to have less of a belief that IT can help drive business success, have more technical debt, and tend to have lesser-skilled people (with less up-to-date skills). They may have been the recipient of many people who fled early cloud-adopting organizations because those people didn’t want to re-skill, so they face significantly harder internal pushback and potentially internal sandbagging of cloud projects. When they do manage to successfully train people, those people often leave within a year for both better pay and a more congenial, faster-moving environment.  Late adopters may simply not be able to generate enough internal competence to even safely and successfully use outsourced assistance.

However, even organizations that are not late adopters often have different parts of the business at different paces of adoption. Notably, they may have digital business divisions, or more ambitious fast-moving business units in general, that have substantial cloud adoption, while other parts of the organization lag behind. Those that are charging ahead may remain successful and continue to expand in the cloud, while the rest of the organization remains unable to beg borrow or steal enough skills from those other successful outposts to overcome the on-premises inertia.

This may lead to an exacerbation of existing market patterns where the digitally ambitious have had outsized and potentially disruptive success… and where other organizations are unable to imitate those successes, leading not just to failures of IT projects, but also meaningful negative business impacts. This, in turn, has a follow-on effect on the cloud providers. As enterprise bets on the cloud grow bigger, one might begin to see these projects, especially mass migration and transformation, as gambles more so than realistically-executable plans. Any plan that is predicated on if we can get the people who can do this stuff is fraught with nontrivial probability of failure.

(As always, my Gartner colleagues and I are happy to advise on inquiry, but there’s only so much we can help you with your skills gap if your organization has the deadly triplet of not offering good pay, not providing a good working environment, and and not making people feel like they’re doing something valuable with their lives. However, I also spend some significant percentage of my inquiry time listening to people vent, so I’m happy to sympathize with your tale of woe, too, and in most cases reassure you that what you’re trying to get your organization to do would be the right thing…)