Staff Augmentation: A Solution to Tackle Cloud Skills Shortage in Companies

According to Gartner analysis report, shortage of talent is the biggest barrier to adoption of 64 percent of the new technologies. This indicates that companies who wish to deploy new technologies to bolster business estimate that lack of skilled people to implement the technology is a major issue.

Cloud skills shortage is due to absence of skilled individuals and rapidly changing technology. This impacts companies in a major way, however cloud skills shortage can be overcome by incorporating staff augmentation. Before looking at how staff augmentation can be a solution for cloud skills shortage, let’s understand the impact of it on companies.

Impact of Cloud Skills Shortage on Companies

1. Decreased Scalability

One of the driving reasons for adopting cloud technology in companies is scalability because a scalable cloud solution helps companies to respond effectively to increase performance and storage. However, due to cloud skills shortage, scalability aspect is hampered, which in turn impacts company’s performance as well.

Decreased scalability affects cost savings because companies upfront expenses rise and they end up buying expensive equipment that may be outdated in a few years. Skilled cloud providers guide the companies to pay for what they use and minimise waste.

With the right cloud skillset, SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) can scale their resources when demand surges and scale it down when demand is slow. However, lack of cloud talent pushes SMBs to spend more on managing extra resources and hardware, which is time consuming and inconvenient.

Further, a cloud expert eliminates the need for physical infrastructure and has the entire system up and running on cloud within minutes instead of weeks or months. Saving time by utilizing cloud skill professionals helps to free up space for other essential projects or tasks at hand.

2. Absence of Team Collaboration

Companies require cloud technology to connect their teams globally. Cloud is designed to communicate and easily collaborate with teams irrespective of geographical location or device connection and without the need to meet in person.

Cloud skills shortage makes it difficult to form a robust team and collaborate it to boost business and revenue of companies. Without efficient skillset to manage cloud, companies ae unable to collect and store data. As data increases, so does its complexities to manage and analyze it.

Apt regulation of cloud solutions by skilled team helps to provision devices, manage users, configure security system, and handle data analytics on cloud. Cloud team collaboration is developed to work and connect with other workflows and applications seamlessly. It integrates into apps and allows users to keep up the workflow, along with augmenting teamwork and productivity.

Furthermore, team collaboration on cloud helps in scalability as well. Cloud skills shortage diminishes the possibility of having a robust team collaboration across multiple locations.

3. Unsatisfied Customer Experience

Positive human experiences and connections are the key to a brand’s success. Companies tend to use tactics and tools for connecting with customers, partners, and employees.

Cloud technology helps to enhance this connectivity. Modern day cloud is integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) tool which is a SaaS software and is hosted on the provider’s servers and is accessed by its customers.

This tool gains customer insights and manages contacts, along with automating tasks. To regulate such tool, a dedicated cloud expert is required, lack of which can result in endless piles of unorganized customer data and delayed assistance to customers.

Leading software companies such as Salesforce are coming up with radical customer experience management solutions that’ll help companies to handle customer services, however, without the presence of a skilled cloud professional, companies are unable to implement novel technologies.

4. Effect on the Disaster Recovery Process

As per a report by Uptime Institute, 44 percent of the surveyed organizations underwent a huge outage that affected businesses. This outage was due to power failure and during these situations its essential to have a robust disaster recovery strategy in place to recover data and resume normal operations.

Cloud skills shortage make is difficult to plan out a solid disaster recovery tactic as there aren’t enough people to handle it or lack talent to do it the right way. Without skilled cloud professionals, companies may have to turn to traditional disaster recovery processes which are complex to monitor and manage.

Maintenance and support of a traditional disaster recovery is time consuming and expensive. By implementing cloud technology and hiring skilled cloud professionals, the whole disaster recovery process is run seamlessly during outages, cyber attacks, system failures, accidents, natural disasters, or software updates.

5. Slow Digital Transformation

Absence of cloud infrastructure and cloud talent results in slow or no digital transformation within companies. Slow digital transformation indicates that companies are out of the competition in the market, have minimal revenue growth, and impact on ROI (Return of Investment).

Cloud technology opens up opportunities for digital transformation through innovation and cost-saving services that are accessible across the globe.

Furthermore, Cloud’s PAYG (Pay-as-you-Go) model allows to create new applications and innovations that can be integrated with the existing systems. Without cloud talent, these opportunities don’t open up, thus resulting in slow digital transformation, which in turn impacts overall business as well.

Staff Augmentation: A Solution For Cloud Skills Shortage

Companies are facing the changing impact of economy, especially when it comes to recruiting IT talent (cloud experts). Shortage of skilled IT professionals has substantial effect on companies in terms of innovation, scalability, flexibility to work, and ability to wrap up projects faster.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021, the IT industry witnessed addition of 213,100 jobs and this not only replaced the jobs lost during the Covid-19 pandemic, but also increased to a level that was more than the pre-pandemic level. However, the statistics reported that despite of having recovered IT jobs, hiring is hindered due to lack of qualified professionals.

To bridge the talent gap, companies are on the lookout for alternatives for cloud technology and staff augmentation or IT staffing is a plausible solution for it.

Staff augmentation opens up opportunities to recruit professionals with distinct skillsets. Staff augmentation helps to gain access to unbiased, focused, and dedicated employees that are willing to undertake projects and meet deadlines.

By hiring skill specific cloud experts through staff augmentation, companies ensure that they remain ahead in the competition by adding domain specific knowledge to their operations. Further, by hiring professionals outside companies helps to land offbeat projects as well.

Staff augmentation provides staff flexibility and allows companies to recruit as per needs of projects and duration. Flexibility is advantageous to companies as it doesn’t affect economic pitfalls and minimizes the risk of hiring expensive employees. Moreover, staff augmentation ameliorates retention rates of in-house employees and offers opportunities to work on niche projects.

Recruiting is a time and money consuming process, and the possibility of landing with an apt cloud professional is uncertain, therefore with staff augmentation there guarantee that companies will get cloud expert. With the right talent, projects are wrapped up in no time, and removes cumbersome tasks during a lengthy project.

In a nutshell, staff augmentation is a solution to cloud skills shortage as it addresses crucial problems faced by the companies while working on projects or running businesses.

Leveraging staff augmentation can help you to tackle negative impact on the companies caused due to cloud skills shortage, so make use of this effective alternative and hire skilled cloud experts for companies.

Arkenea is a top rated IT staffing company in the US with options for contract staffing, contract-to-hire and direct hires. Get in touch avail the advantage of our large pool of talent at your fingertips.