A recent report by SoftwareOne Holding AG has shown 98 percent of global organizations are facing a cloud skills gap, resulting in an average of five month delays to digital transformation projects and a third of businesses taking a significant financial hit.

The SoftwareOne Cloud Skills Survey gathered the opinions of 500 IT decision-makers (ITDMs) from the UK, Benelux, North America and Australia. The goal was to understand how the cloud-skills shortage is impacting IT teams and how they plan to address the issue in 2024.

Almost all, 95 percent of the ITDMs  believe their team has been negatively impacted by the cloud skills gap, while almost 62 percent report having their workload increase in the last 12 months.

Of those surveyed by SoftwareOne, 93 percent agreed that investing in cloud-managed services will be a priority in the next 12 months, with respondents also believing that investing in cloud-managed services could increase productivity globally by as much as 156 percent.

Regarding how much the cloud skills gap has so far impacted work across their teams, 43 percent of respondents noted their organizations have struggled to stay up-to-date with security and compliance. 41 percent of those asked had application performance issues and outages as a result of the lack of cloud skills, with 38 percent having missed KPIs on delivering new business innovations. A third said they had to restrict their use of the cloud altogether.

The survey respondents looked positively to the future, however, with 87 percent confident that the cloud skills gap within their organizations would improve in the next five years.

“For companies who want to accelerate their digital transformation, closing the cloud skills gap is critical. We have seen our clients innovate faster through cloud and application mastery while  reducing their risk profile,” stated Craig Thomson, senior vice president cloud and application services, SoftwareOne. “Our research into the cloud skills gap shows how much is at stake. The majority of organizations see cloud managed services as a crucial way to bridge the gap, with the option of scaling back these resources as they build their own internal capabilities for the future.”