Cloud computing skills shortage forces CIOs to grow their own

April 14, 2012, 7:35 AM — When Majestic Realty Co., a Los Angeles-based commercial real estate developer, moved to Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite for cloud-based email in early 2011, CIO Jon Grunzweig was shocked by the lack of technical support he found for BPOS in the marketplace.

For instance, when Grunzweig's network infrastructure team first configured Outlook for the cloud, his staff set it up so that email headers would come in to users' inboxes first, followed by the "detail" or body of the message. This way, users would see emails--more exactly, the headers--coming into their inboxes in nearly real-time. Nevertheless this configuration created a problem: Because Majestic Realty's cloud email was slower than its on-premise email, when users saw new headers in their inboxes and clicked to open them, the messages didn't open because they hadn't finished downloading. Users didn't understand why their email wasn't opening.

The IT industry

Across the IT industry, CIOs, innovation vendors and consultants agree that there is a serious shortage of cloud computing skills that threatens to hamper adoption. Whether it's software engineers who know how to develop applications for the cloud, resource planners who can estimate an enterprise's need for computing capacity, architects who can integrate services from different cloud vendors, or administrators who understand how to configure and support cloud-based services, a wide range of cloud-related skills are in great demand, and companies can't leverage the benefits of cloud computing without them.

To illustrate the scope of the skills shortage, a recent analysis of hiring trends from Wanted Analytics, a provider of recruiting data, quantifies that the demand for cloud skills far outstrips supply. The company counted more than 3,400 job ads for IT professionals that required cloud computing skills in February 2012, a 99% increase over February 2011.

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