How to Close the Cloud Literacy Gap and Improve Cloud ROI | Federal News Network

Global spending on commercial cloud computing services is approaching $500 billion. Eventually, the cloud will account for more than 50% of organizations’ IT budgets.

Yet, by some estimates, half of planned cloud migration projects miss their schedule, sometimes by up to two years. Why? Drew Firment, senior vice president of cloud transformation for A Cloud Guru | Pluralsight said it’s because of a lack of cloud computing skills in the very organizations that are looking for a strong return on their cloud investments.

A survey by Pluralsight showed that 75% of government IT leaders pursue cloud-first strategies and want to use the cloud to drive value, Firment said on the Federal News Network show. Industry Exchange Cloud.

“The reality is,” Firment said, “we also discovered that only 8% of the workforce has the skills to do this. power of cloud computing to be able to carry out the mission of these agencies.”

Skills gap in critical cloud skills

Why the gap? After all, whether they’re using clouds or their own data centers, IT managers want to host applications and data and make them available to users.

The difference is that the data center model requires skills in planning, budgeting, and acquiring servers and other equipment. This requires know-how in the supply, operation and maintenance of systems.

In contrast, cloud mining pushes all of this activity to cloud service providers with just a few keystrokes, Firment noted. To leverage the value potential of the cloud, agency IT leaders must understand infrastructure as code and how the elasticity of the cloud can be used to optimize workloads and services.

“It’s really a mindset shift for leaders to be able to understand cloud computing at the organizational level, at the agency level,” he said. “Then it trickles down to individuals.”

Beyond that, the cloud also requires additional specific knowledge and skills. How can agencies get started?

“The cloud is a culture, and there is a language,” Firment said. “I generally recommend starting with what I would call cloud awareness.” Literacy encompasses understanding cloud-related terms such as elasticity, scalability and resilience, he said.

Translate cloud talk

Firment said a typical cloud discussion might look like this: “If I walked into a room and said, ‘Hey, we want to run a VPC with an IGW. And maybe we’ll use ELB in front of some EC-IIs with EBS and RDS This alphabet soup is a cloudy shortcut.

“All I asked for was a private data center with server storage and a database,” Firment said.

“A really good way to learn about the cloud,” he added, “is to take one of the introductory cloud certifications offered by, oh, pick a cloud provider.” AWS offers what it calls Cloud Practitioner and Cloud Fundamentals certifications, for example.

By establishing what Firment called an infantry of cloud-fluent employees, culture and knowledge can spread throughout the organization. “It’s all based on your infantry and being able to democratize those skills in that language,” he said. “It’s fundamental to the success of any organization.”

Pluralsight has positioned itself as a non-exclusive skills guru. “We are a one-stop-shop for all the different cloud providers and cloud-adjacent technologies,” Firment said. The company offers experiential learning in various topics such as Kubernetes, Python and other programming languages, as well as cloud computing security, he said.

“There’s a separation between leaders who invest in their workforce,” he said, “versus laggards who still don’t have a strategic plan for how they’re going to approach development. of the work force.”

But a strategic workforce development plan is essential, Firment advised. It can contribute to cloud success with measurable metrics and by maturing the organization’s cloud capabilities, said Firment, which holds a patent for measuring cloud maturity.

He identified three key indicators:

• The amount of workloads migrating to the cloud.
• Whether a migration came with the desired elasticity, resiliency, and security in a well-architected cloud framework.
• Cost-effectiveness, such as whether on- or off-cloud workload instances match user patterns.

Achieving excellence in cloud computing, Firment concluded, starts with investing in training and skills development, and then spreading that knowledge throughout the organization.

“You just have to make sure that you assess your maturation in terms of organizational skills and how much you have democratized that. In my experience, the two are very tightly integrated and you can’t have one without the other.

To listen and watch others Industry Exchange Cloud sessions, visit our event page.