The cloud is hardly new, and public cloud growth numbers suggest that we are finally starting to reach a tipping point for cloud adoption. Yet thirteen years after AWS launched the first modern cloud service, an Accenture survey finds that large organizations continue to struggle with the transition. It’s an area where MSPs with specialized cloud skill sets could potentially thrive.
Accenture surveyed 200 senior IT executives from 200 companies with over $1 billion in annual revenue. Those surveyed came from ten different industries in eight countries. Last year at AWS re:Invent, AWS CEO Andy Jassy pointed out that we were just starting to see major cloud traction in the United States. In other parts of the world, they could be at least two or three years away, so there is still a lot of room for potential growth. As the survey suggests, companies are likely to be at vastly different stages where the cloud is concerned.
While companies struggled to understand the challenges of moving workloads to the cloud, they still recognized the need to do it. “While the vast majority of companies cite achieving some level of their desired outcomes, only 35 percent of companies report they have fully achieved their expected outcomes across the four categories of cost, speed, business enablement, and service levels,” stated the report.
Build your cloud skills
If traditional IT departments are struggling to make the transition to the cloud, it’s a perfect role for a trusted third-party advisor (like you). However, you have to know more than your customer to make this work. That means hiring people who understand cloud migration issues, who have experience using the major cloud platforms, and can help clients manage a hybrid infrastructure environment where some of the resources will remain on-premises and some in the cloud.
Moving to the cloud is more than a technical problem though, it’s also a cultural problem, as with so many major technology changes. People will worry how their skills fit into the new approach, so you have to be sensitive to that, as do your clients.
We have come a long way from conferences in 2012 and 2013 when old school IT executives would say they would go to the cloud ‘over my dead body’ (that’s an actual quote). There is a general recognition now that it’s the cloud or bust, but the Accenture survey shows that it’s not always going to be an easy transition for these companies. On the bright side, MSPs can help bridge the knowledge gap.
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