In-house skills slowing Cloud take-up globally, suggests study

The public sector fears a lack of in-house skills inhibits a move to the Cloud, according to a global study by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

This found that 68% of public-sector respondents said they view Cloud solutions as a tactical move or a necessity, compared with only 52% in the private sector. Nonetheless, 43% of current Cloud users and 75% of prospective users in the public sector don't think they have the necessary IT skills to support a Cloud environment.

The study notes: "Public sector respondents felt government policies have accelerated a move to the Cloud more than twice as many times as those who felt it has decelerated adoption, primarily citing the shift as a way to reduce costs. Nearly half of the worldwide public sector respondents indicated budget restrictions are driving a more rapid adoption of [such] solutions."

A major hurdle here is the perceived lack to skills to manage the journey to the Cloud in-house; currently, 43% of public sector respondents did not feel they had the skills in place to support Cloud versus only 23% in the private sector.

Despite this, Cloud Computing is maturing rapidly, with 70% of respondents indicating they are either using or currently investigating Cloud computing for remotely hosted applications or to store data. More importantly, of those organisations that have deployed Cloud solutions, 60% have already seen business value.

"Based on the findings of this global study, AMD believes it is time for the industry to re-shape the way we think about Cloud technology," said Patrick Patla, general manager and vice president, Server and Embedded Divisions. "The findings point to the fact that while the era of Cloud computing has arrived, there are radically different attitudes, approaches, concerns and levels of maturity depending on business environment. As an industry, we must provide clear guidance about how to optimize hardware and software for all types of Clouds, focusing on custom parts for specific workloads that are prevalent in the Cloud and the appropriate balance of performance, power and cost efficiency they require."

With Cloud adoption on the rise, the value of data stored there is increasing as well. Sixty-three percent of those using the Cloud to host data estimated they store more than $250,000 worth of data in the Cloud. If the survey pool is extrapolated out to become representative of the industry as a whole, then billions of dollars of data can be estimated to be in the Cloud.

While there has been much speculation over whether CIOs are drivers for or inhibitors against the Cloud, AMD research reckons that: "This new era of IT is being driven by the CIO, head of IT or IT Director more than 50% of the time, placing a huge amount of importance on the technology at the core of the Cloud."

Infrastructure also plays a major role in Cloud adoption: "Ninety-two percent of respondents currently using the Cloud stated that infrastructure was important in their decision to adopt Cloud computing, dispelling the myth that Cloud customers do not care to know about the physical servers housing and running their data."

This has clear implications for Cloud providers: "With such a clear level of importance placed on the IT infrastructure of the Cloud, it is imperative for vendors to move beyond the hype and talk about the real issues at the core of the Cloud [debate]. Email, finance/account and web serving are all fast-growing workloads in the Cloud, yet have significantly different compute demands," the study concludes.