Cloud Literacy in 2023

For the past several years, most organizations have made it their priority to shift much of their applications and data from on-premises to the cloud. However, despite widespread cloud adoption, organizations are still struggling to achieve workload efficiency, deepen cloud maturity and ensure that their teams are fully cloud literate.

As organizations evaluate their approach to cloud adoption and integration in the year to come, here are key considerations to help guide ongoing cloud transformation journeys.

Increasing Investments in Fundamental Cloud Computing Skills

In 2023, the cloud skills gap will continue to expand because – although most organizations are coming to realize the importance of cloud – there remains a myriad of highly technical individuals that see their roles in terms of technologies and not in terms of solving fundamental business problems. This misalignment distracts professionals from acquiring the cloud skills they currently need to solve business problems efficiently.

According to Pluralsight’s State of Cloud report, 75% of tech leaders are building all new products and features in the cloud moving forward — while 20% of learners have skills gaps in fundamental cloud fluency and only 8% of technologists have significant cloud-related skills and experience. As a result, there will continue to be high demand for lower-level cloud infrastructure skills as these technologies require more people than the higher-level services do to operate them successfully.

Becoming Multilingual in Multi-Cloud

Multi-cloud strategies have become increasingly common across the industry, with more and more enterprises embracing multi-cloud by either design or happenstance. The growing prevalence of multi-cloud will accelerate the demand for tools needed to manage the increased complexity as enterprises struggle to wrangle the span of their implementations. Businesses will need to be prepared for the trifecta of multi-cloud challenges and solutions that will trend in 2023, including security, cost and operations.

Additionally, according to my colleague Drew Firment, VP of Enterprise Strategies at Pluralsight, “It’ll also be necessary for technologists to become multilingual across two or more cloud providers. With the existing shortage of cloud talent, expect the trend of multi-cloud strategy to add a further strain to the existing skills gap.”

Capitalizing on Serverless in Your Cloud-Native Approach

For those who are new to cloud, serverless will be beneficial to businesses pursuing a cloud-native approach: to shift all the details of capacity planning and scaling to the cloud vendors, who can benefit from multi-tenant economies of scale.

Taking advantage of such a powerful (i.e. higher level of abstraction) system can confer a huge competitive advantage on both organizations and individuals. Focusing on serverless eliminates wasted effort – both in learning the technology and in running systems.

Prioritizing Agility Over Lift-and-Shift to Deepen Cloud Adoption and Maturity

Businesses will need to take a more aggressive look at their current systems and applications to determine what can be rebuilt as cloud-native (i.e. serverless), minimum viable product (MVP) or retired entirely, rather than trying to refactor, rehost or re-platform them. This is because lift-and-shift methods can be costly and time consuming, especially when the resulting system conflicts with the cloud’s core value proposition of agility.

Embracing and prioritizing agility can free up more resources for businesses to continue deepening their cloud adoption and further support the virtuous cycle.

Competitively Cloud Competent

As cloud solutions and strategies continue to evolve, so must our approach to transformation and maturation. Whether just starting your adoption journey or seeking to improve or finesse current cloud efforts, organizations that can ensure the strength of their cloud talent, identify and improve operational inefficiencies and explore new and innovative cloud management strategies will be well equipped to tackle what lies ahead in the world of cloud.

By Mattias Andersson, Principal Developer Advocate at Pluralsight