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Multicloud Skills Are Critical, But Lacking

Organizations are hindered by a large multicloud skills gap, according to the 2023 State of Cloud Report from Pluralsight.

The findings underscore how critical cloud skills development is for organizations to ensure the multicloud reward outweighs the risk.


A Hasty Rush to Multicloud

In 2023, multicloud strategies are becoming increasingly commonplace, with more than 65% of organizations currently operating within multicloud environments and another 20% saying they're actively pursuing an additional cloud platform for their cloud environment.

However, in the rush toward multicloud architectures, many organizations are finding themselves underprepared and lacking resources to succeed. The report found that:

■ Only 20% of organizations have defined a cloud security strategy while another 28% are working to build one.

■ To compound the problem, only 9% have extensive experience with more than one cloud provider.

There is good news, though — 71% of leaders expect their cloud budgets to increase over the next 12 months and 74% of leaders expect their cloud skills development budgets to increase in parallel.

Organizations should be strategically leveraging cloud skills development if they want to build a culture of cloud and maximize their cloud investments

"Learners are struggling to keep up with such a fast-paced cloud evolution," said Drew Firment, Chief Cloud Strategist at Pluralsight. "As a result, most organizations still lack the maturity to operationalize multicloud computing, and this year's research findings make that clear. Organizations should be strategically leveraging cloud skills development if they want to build a culture of cloud and maximize their cloud investments."

The Need for Multicloud Skills Development

Organizations on the path to multicloud need to invest in skills development — but where should they begin?

The report reveals the top in-demand skills and skills gaps across cloud roles in 2023:

■ Artificial intelligence and machine learning skills are the most in-demand cloud skills (23%) in 2023, up from 16% in 2023. In last year's report, data analytics skills were the most in-demand (33%), but fewer technologists (18%) ranked it as an in-demand skill in 2023.

■ The largest cloud skills gaps exist in data, analytics, engineering, and storage (42%), followed by security and governance (37%). In 2022, automation and DevOps were cited as the most glaring skills gaps (30%).

As data and AI-based solutions continue to dominate the tech landscape, it's increasingly important for cloud practitioners to be fluent in these skill sets. The report makes it clear that these skill areas will continue to be a huge focus in 2023. To bridge these skills gaps, organizations must lean into developing their technology teams so they are equipped to keep pace with the rapidly changing tech landscape

Methodology: Survey results from more than 1,000 technologists and leaders in the United States, Europe, Australia, and India on the most current trends and challenges in cloud strategy and learning.

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Multicloud Skills Are Critical, But Lacking

Organizations are hindered by a large multicloud skills gap, according to the 2023 State of Cloud Report from Pluralsight.

The findings underscore how critical cloud skills development is for organizations to ensure the multicloud reward outweighs the risk.


A Hasty Rush to Multicloud

In 2023, multicloud strategies are becoming increasingly commonplace, with more than 65% of organizations currently operating within multicloud environments and another 20% saying they're actively pursuing an additional cloud platform for their cloud environment.

However, in the rush toward multicloud architectures, many organizations are finding themselves underprepared and lacking resources to succeed. The report found that:

■ Only 20% of organizations have defined a cloud security strategy while another 28% are working to build one.

■ To compound the problem, only 9% have extensive experience with more than one cloud provider.

There is good news, though — 71% of leaders expect their cloud budgets to increase over the next 12 months and 74% of leaders expect their cloud skills development budgets to increase in parallel.

Organizations should be strategically leveraging cloud skills development if they want to build a culture of cloud and maximize their cloud investments

"Learners are struggling to keep up with such a fast-paced cloud evolution," said Drew Firment, Chief Cloud Strategist at Pluralsight. "As a result, most organizations still lack the maturity to operationalize multicloud computing, and this year's research findings make that clear. Organizations should be strategically leveraging cloud skills development if they want to build a culture of cloud and maximize their cloud investments."

The Need for Multicloud Skills Development

Organizations on the path to multicloud need to invest in skills development — but where should they begin?

The report reveals the top in-demand skills and skills gaps across cloud roles in 2023:

■ Artificial intelligence and machine learning skills are the most in-demand cloud skills (23%) in 2023, up from 16% in 2023. In last year's report, data analytics skills were the most in-demand (33%), but fewer technologists (18%) ranked it as an in-demand skill in 2023.

■ The largest cloud skills gaps exist in data, analytics, engineering, and storage (42%), followed by security and governance (37%). In 2022, automation and DevOps were cited as the most glaring skills gaps (30%).

As data and AI-based solutions continue to dominate the tech landscape, it's increasingly important for cloud practitioners to be fluent in these skill sets. The report makes it clear that these skill areas will continue to be a huge focus in 2023. To bridge these skills gaps, organizations must lean into developing their technology teams so they are equipped to keep pace with the rapidly changing tech landscape

Methodology: Survey results from more than 1,000 technologists and leaders in the United States, Europe, Australia, and India on the most current trends and challenges in cloud strategy and learning.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...