Faced with an aging data center in need of capital-intensive upgrades “let’s just move it to the cloud,” is a common solution suggested by corporate boards and executives.  If only migrating applications were as simple as the decision to do so.   

There are multiple factors that go into the decision to move applications to the cloud, affordability, performance, compliance, and security are all key decision points.  When discussing the financial aspects many technologists think of the difficulty in controlling costs due to the challenges of projecting usage, storage, and additional service needs.  Traditional data center infrastructure costs are much easier to project and keep in check.   

But one of the biggest issues in adopting public cloud is the need to have the talent on staff to match the requirements of public cloud.   Cloud architecture and management is still a relatively new profession, and the demand in the industry had created a skills gap pitting what is essentially the haves and the have nots. 

Hyperscale cloud providers and other richly funded organizations have compensation packages and opportunity that midsize enterprises and SMBs simply can’t match.  Additionally, cloud specialists know that there is always another company around the corner with a big budget cloud project that will hire them for more.  As a result, technologists with cloud skills tend to be job-hoppers, knowing there is great demand for their specific skills even in when the tech job market is relatively flat.    

In fact, many experts cite committing to a big budget for employees as job one in a cloud adoption strategy in order to overcome the skills gap.  

InfoWorld reports “those who will win the skills acquisition game are investing money in solving this problem. They are spending on training, hiring ahead of need, recruiting more junior-level workers who can be trained and mentored, finding mentors, and investing in executives who know how to do all this. It also means spending about 40% more on non-productive upskilling, which will lead to more productivity.”

For many mid-sized enterprises and SMBs this sounds expensive, especially if their current applications are working well in a traditional data center environment.   For those companies, hesitant to take on the risk and uncertainty of public cloud adoption but not looking to make major capital investments in a legacy data center, the answer may be colocation in a proven, fiber-rich, highly redundant data center.

Cloud Challenges:  The skill gap is only one factor worth consideration when evaluating a move to the cloud.  Cloud Challenges will help you determine if AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other public cloud platforms are right for you. This report is available to you by clicking here or emailing strategy@directltx.com.