Skills shortage drives businesses to cloud
Cross-sector survey suggests a less expected reason for a move online
Survey respondents have cited a lack of in-house skills as a reason for moving their computing resources to the cloud.
A poll of 250 senior IT and business decision makers in public and private sectors by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) found that a lack of in-house skills was a factor in the decision to adopt cloud services in about half (49 per cent) of cloud users that responded.
Simon Bearne, UK sales and marketing director at CIF member and cloud services provider Claranet, said the ability to "rent" resources and skills is surely what outsourcing and cloud are all about.
"With the UK suffering from a skills shortage in the IT industry, it makes more sense for businesses to focus existing internal IT staff on higher-value strategic work that maximises their knowledge of the company's IT systems and their understanding of the business, and leave the more mundane work to those outside the organisation," he said.
However, the phenomenon may also result in making businesses dependent on outsourced IT, Bearne (pictured, left) noted.
"Over the past decade, there has been a shift towards data and information management in IT departments, rather than having them look after the 'nuts and bolts' of IT. The fact is that many organisations cannot afford to hire software and hardware specialists, so have to outsource," he said.
The research surveyed a range of UK-based enterprises, SMBs and public sector organisations. Participants had to answer 90 questions in detail, to provide an in-depth perspective on UK cloud adoption.
Of the 250 end-user organisations questioned, 15 per cent came from the IT and technology sector, 14 per cent from educational establishments, 12 per cent from manufacturing, 10 per cent from retail and distribution, 10 per cent from business or professional services and six per cent from financial services.
A further 26 per cent comprised public sector and not-for-profit organisations ranging from central and local government to healthcare and charities.