Although there is a widespread eagerness among companies in the Middle East to migrate to the cloud, the lack of talent, however, is hobbling companies from achieving the goal.
Rackspace Technology, a leading end-to-end multi-cloud technology services company, has revealed that despite companies in the Middle East accelerating their digital transformation programs, just 36% of technology leaders report a willingness to take on risk, and this is most notably due to the shortage of IT skills.
According to the Annual Research Report 2022, many organizations are now looking to move to use the cloud to capitalize on the benefits that early adopters have discovered, such as automating workflows, scaling IoT apps, and deploying virtual assistants. However, security and IT skills worries have cast a shadow over the pursuit of such digital transformation, resulting in a low appetite for risk.
The report revealed that security and data privacy concerns prevent organizations from achieving peak cloud benefit and innovation in the space.
The second most reported challenge is the IT talent shortage, which is in turn exacerbating leaders’ security challenges. In fact, the talent shortage is inhibiting organizations’ adoption of new development methods in their DevOps and presents a barrier to serverless adoption.
According to IDC, the Gulf’s lack of IT talent and skills availability is a significant challenge for 45% of organizations regarding cloud management, which greatly impacts their migration initiatives.
The lack of awareness around IT security, access control, and compliance is an essential challenge for organizations looking to migrate to the cloud in the region.
Moreover, connectivity is another issue hindering migration to the cloud, and one quite specific to the region, because quality differs from country to country, which makes things complicated. However, things are improving with infrastructure advancing and more providers launching regional data centers.
Seeing various hurdles, IT executives have had reasons to avoid or delay migration, but the benefits of moving to the cloud have convinced them to take steps gradually. Before Covid-19, the main advantages of migrating to the cloud appeared to be cost-related, but the upheaval caused by the pandemic has highlighted the cloud’s reliability, scalability, and flexibility, spurring many more businesses to accelerate their migration.
Many organizations began their migration journeys with non-critical workloads such as disaster recovery, backup, and collaboration solutions. However, they are gradually moving towards critical workloads such as business applications and analytics platforms.
Finding top-rated tech talent
Despite widespread enthusiasm for cloud solutions, there are still barriers to cloud adoption, beginning with a lack of internal expertise. This reveals a gap between what IT decision-makers intend to achieve and their capacity to get started with their own teams.
Attracting and retaining top tech and IT talents has been an ongoing challenge for CIOs and IT leaders. As more companies look to hire those with the right skills to lead digital transformation efforts, the competition levels are higher than ever. That’s because almost every company vies for candidates from the same talent pool.
In the digital, hybrid work era, businesses are emphasizing attracting skilled tech staff. However, a recent wave of resignations has left more org chart voids to fill with fewer accessible candidates, especially since many qualified individuals have decided to avoid the corporate sector entirely.
To help overcome this critical challenge, enterprises need to continue investing in company culture initiatives, collaboration tools, and training to maintain their current talent and attract the best possible candidates for open positions.
According to the report, businesses are also bolstering their efforts to attract new IT talent by promoting training and development opportunities, increasing salaries, and promoting hybrid and remote working opportunities. And the same incentives are being offered to current employees to help curb staff turnover.