Skip to main content

72% of Mid-Size Companies Face Significant Cloud Management Talent Shortage, Hindering Business Growth

Prashant Ketkar
Parallels

As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution. And by hybrid cloud, I mean a combination of public cloud, private clouds and on-premises infrastructure used together by organizations to store, manage, and run their data applications. While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model.

According to a recent study done by Parallels, a sub-brand of Alludo, the ease of talent search plays a pivotal role in driving the adoption of the hybrid cloud. In fact, a significant majority of IT professionals (62%) find a lack of cloud management skills to be a barrier to growth, an issue even more prevalent in mid-size companies (72%).

To cope, companies are increasing their use of hybrid cloud infrastructure. Nearly two-thirds of the survey respondents (64%) had already implemented a hybrid approach and 38% plan to further embrace a hybrid cloud approach in the next year.

The research also looked at the usage of the public cloud, uncovering that the majority derive most value from it. However, within large enterprises, 18% of respondents admit to not getting the most value out of the public cloud. About 11% across all companies find themselves in a similar position. Among this group of respondents, 41% cite concerns over the complexity of migrating to the public cloud. This challenge is further exacerbated by a lack of in-house cloud expertise (33%) and IT recruiting challenges (15%).

Hybrid Cloud for Hybrid Work

The research found that hybrid cloud infrastructure is the most prevalent model for supporting a hybrid workforce. Out of the 83% of respondents who currently work in a hybrid (working both remote and in the office) structure, 82% use the hybrid cloud.

The top five benefits reported for the use of hybrid cloud, compared to 100% public cloud or 100% on-premises infrastructure, are increased flexibility (49%), improved security (46%), cost savings (45%), increased reliability (44%), and scalability (40%).

Legacy Applications Persist

The continued significance of legacy applications is also contributing to the ongoing adoption of hybrid cloud. Nearly all (96%) of the IT professionals surveyed claim that they currently need legacy Windows and Linux applications, and almost half (49%) report that they will need to continue to access these legacy applications more than five years from now.

This is especially true for smaller companies with 54% signifying this is very important. Only 4% of those surveyed reported that they did not use any legacy applications. A hybrid cloud approach helps overcome the legacy application challenge by enabling incremental changes to the IT infrastructure, without a wholesale upgrade to applications that may not be cloud ready.

By using a more incremental cloud adoption approach, supported by easy-to-manage software solutions that are enhanced with automation and security, IT professionals can realize the flexibility and cost savings they want from the cloud, without specialized cloud management expertise.

Survey Methodology: Parallels' Hybrid Cloud Survey was conducted in July 2023 with data from 805 IT professionals that are using the public cloud to some extent in US, UK and Germany.

Prashant Ketkar is CTO of Parallels, a sub-brand of Alludo

Hot Topics

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

72% of Mid-Size Companies Face Significant Cloud Management Talent Shortage, Hindering Business Growth

Prashant Ketkar
Parallels

As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution. And by hybrid cloud, I mean a combination of public cloud, private clouds and on-premises infrastructure used together by organizations to store, manage, and run their data applications. While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model.

According to a recent study done by Parallels, a sub-brand of Alludo, the ease of talent search plays a pivotal role in driving the adoption of the hybrid cloud. In fact, a significant majority of IT professionals (62%) find a lack of cloud management skills to be a barrier to growth, an issue even more prevalent in mid-size companies (72%).

To cope, companies are increasing their use of hybrid cloud infrastructure. Nearly two-thirds of the survey respondents (64%) had already implemented a hybrid approach and 38% plan to further embrace a hybrid cloud approach in the next year.

The research also looked at the usage of the public cloud, uncovering that the majority derive most value from it. However, within large enterprises, 18% of respondents admit to not getting the most value out of the public cloud. About 11% across all companies find themselves in a similar position. Among this group of respondents, 41% cite concerns over the complexity of migrating to the public cloud. This challenge is further exacerbated by a lack of in-house cloud expertise (33%) and IT recruiting challenges (15%).

Hybrid Cloud for Hybrid Work

The research found that hybrid cloud infrastructure is the most prevalent model for supporting a hybrid workforce. Out of the 83% of respondents who currently work in a hybrid (working both remote and in the office) structure, 82% use the hybrid cloud.

The top five benefits reported for the use of hybrid cloud, compared to 100% public cloud or 100% on-premises infrastructure, are increased flexibility (49%), improved security (46%), cost savings (45%), increased reliability (44%), and scalability (40%).

Legacy Applications Persist

The continued significance of legacy applications is also contributing to the ongoing adoption of hybrid cloud. Nearly all (96%) of the IT professionals surveyed claim that they currently need legacy Windows and Linux applications, and almost half (49%) report that they will need to continue to access these legacy applications more than five years from now.

This is especially true for smaller companies with 54% signifying this is very important. Only 4% of those surveyed reported that they did not use any legacy applications. A hybrid cloud approach helps overcome the legacy application challenge by enabling incremental changes to the IT infrastructure, without a wholesale upgrade to applications that may not be cloud ready.

By using a more incremental cloud adoption approach, supported by easy-to-manage software solutions that are enhanced with automation and security, IT professionals can realize the flexibility and cost savings they want from the cloud, without specialized cloud management expertise.

Survey Methodology: Parallels' Hybrid Cloud Survey was conducted in July 2023 with data from 805 IT professionals that are using the public cloud to some extent in US, UK and Germany.

Prashant Ketkar is CTO of Parallels, a sub-brand of Alludo

Hot Topics

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...