Large enterprises requiring digital transformation help

The words 'skills shortages' should usually translate into opportunities for the channel and customers trying to go through the digital transformation process appear to be suffering.

Research from the Cloud Industry Forum and BT has found that, although there is plenty of enthusiasm from customers around spending on digital transformation, skills shortages and migration and integration issues are causing problems.

The research was aimed at finding out what was happening in those organisations that employed more than 1,000 staff with the main conclusions being that three quarters either have a digital transformation strategy in place or are rolling one out.

When customers talked about hurdles, barriers and problems, the main one was around skill shortages with 59% stating that they lacked the staff with integration and migration skills, 64% needed more security help and 54% were lacking digital transformation expertise.

“The research confirms that most enterprises have well-developed strategies aimed at minimising digital disruption and enhancing competitiveness. Cloud is clearly an enabler, but many organisations are finding challenges in achieving the agility and flexibility they seek. Unlike small organisations, who can easily be more agile and nimbler in the face of market conditions, change within large enterprises, whose IT estates are infinitely more complex, is much more difficult to achieve," said David Simpkins, general manager, managed services and public cloud at BT.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing enterprises managing a wide range of workloads, combining public and private cloud deployments with data centre infrastructure, while at the same time addressing a range of new security threats. This is changing the skillsets that enterprise IT departments need, and it is clear that many will need greater support to safely transition to the digital age,” he added.

The idea that the channel would play an important role was picked up by Alex Hilton, CEO at CIF, who said that large enterprises were finding digital transformation a challenge.

"Many have invested heavily in their company assets and carry with them a significant amount of tech debt, often making change difficult, slow and expensive. This makes the customer and IT supplier relationship critical, and enterprise organisations must consider their choice of partner carefully to help them navigate this complexity and integrate existing legacy investments with newer cloud-based technologies. Those that do not will find themselves at a digital disadvantage," he added.