Lack of skills and resources hampering organisations’ digital transformation plans

New research launched today by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and BT has revealed that  digital transformation within many large UK organisations is being slowed by shortages of in-house digital skills, inadequate budgets and lack of appropriate support from partners.

The research is based on a survey of 40 IT decision makers and business decision makers within enterprises employing more than 1,000. It found that 98% organisations’ digital transformation strategy is at least fairly clear. Despite this, 41% of respondents said lack of human resources (41%), lack of skills in-house (40%) and lack of budget (38%) is preventing their organisation becoming digitised more quickly.  Twenty five per cent do not believe they have appropriate support from their partners.

Complexity is a major issue. The research finds that organisations are managing an increasingly sophisticated mix of their own on-premise datacentres (37%), together with private space in third party datacentres (28%), and a growing use of public cloud (33.5%).

On average, 35% of organisational workloads in enterprises are stored within public cloud, with 27% held in private cloud. While this equates to over 60% of workloads now being cloud-based, 38% are still stored on-premise, suggesting that enterprises still tend to favour traditional or hybrid approaches.

David Simpkins, General Manager - Managed Services and Public Cloud, BT, said: “Digital transformation is now commonplace but it’s clear that many businesses are facing significant challenges in finding the specialist skills and adequate resources to create and manage the right hybrid infrastructure for their digital business.

“Whilst public cloud is attractive and fast-growing, private cloud is still the right choice for many organisations that have rigorous application performance requirements, legacy applications unsuited to public cloud or which operate in a highly regulated environment. Managing hybrid cloud can be complex but with an explosion in data traffic, rising customer expectations, new competitors emerging and cost pressures intensifying, companies cannot risk delays to their business transformation.”

Alex Hilton, CEO, Cloud Industry Forum, added: “The Cloud continues to be a great enabler, both in the way it is being currently used and in its potential to define the future of digital transformation. Enterprises are fully aware of its importance, with more and more now seeing it as integral to the smooth running of the business. A crucial next step is for cloud providers is to take note of what organisations are looking for in terms of cloud expertise and support, and ensure that these demands are met.”