Since debuting in 2006, Amazon Web Services has redefined modern IT architecture, leading to a complete transformation in Information Technology investment models, business agility, and human capital needs. According to a Gartner study, worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecasted to total $679 billion in 2024, and is projected to exceed $1 trillion by 2027.

As organizations race to adapt or fall behind their competitors, each cloud investment requires careful navigation of the organizational constraints in people, processes, and technology. Businesses that are too focused on technology adoption often find they have failed to make adequate investments in people and processes. Conversely, organizations that focus on making their people and processes cloud-ready frequently struggle to catch up to competitors as they are slower to adopt cloud-native technologies.

While today’s technology leaders can benefit from proven use cases, adoption frameworks, and success stories that inform enterprise technical strategy, there are no roadmaps to help navigate the human capital journey of cloud migration. Solving technology is only one part of the problem, showing a clear need for organizations to invest in a cloud competency journey.

Organizations embarking on cloud migrations or planning future migration efforts face numerous technical hurdles that define the overall strategic roadmap of adoption. Selecting a primary cloud vendor, determining appropriate cloud-ready workloads, and implementing a technology transformation sprint are often the only objectives of a cloud adoption roadmap. While this intense focus on technical transformation may succeed in selecting cloud architectures aligned to business needs, it frequently fails to address gaps in technical competency across the organization.

As businesses establish footholds in cloud services, technical resources must learn complex new technologies while maintaining legacy on-premise architectures. This additional strain on resources reveals organizational talent gaps that require expensive and complicated measures to resolve. As a secondary challenge, organizations often need help establishing cloud-ready processes as their existing personnel lack the long-term technical experience to implement and follow best practices routinely.

Attempts to rapidly upskill in-house personnel result in unrealistic expectations when resources must maintain legacy technology platforms, learn new solutions, and rapidly context-switch between diverse environments. Alternately, attempts to hire new cloud-native talent can create organizational chaos, lags in knowledge transfer, and burdensome costs as organizations compete for prime resources in a highly competitive talent market.

For organizations to succeed in planning their cloud adoption journey, it is imperative to prepare for a corresponding cloud talent journey to ensure the achievement of objectives.

The speed of cloud innovation is unparalleled. AWS launched hundreds of new features in 2023 alone, and cloud competitors are investing billions in their platforms to keep pace. While this rapid enablement provides businesses with vast technical and operational agility options, it also presents a vast challenge in maintaining talent competency. Each new cloud service and technology may present new business opportunities, but most organizations lack the technical agility to advance their in-house competencies to match the speed of cloud.

This growing cloud competency gap constrains technical agility and reduces overall operational resiliency, and the gap only grows more significant with each newly adopted cloud service. When cloud architectures are implemented and managed by non-cloud-native technical resources, organizations often suffer unconstrained consumption costs, critical security risks from resource misconfigurations, and costly unplanned service interruptions and outages.

A thorough analysis of business objectives contrasted with known cloud competency gaps often reveals an insurmountable impasse. Organizations can no longer afford to wait to begin a cloud adoption journey, yet they also cannot defer technical objectives so that their talent can prepare for the future.

But what if there was a way to bridge the talent gap, execute your cloud migration journey, and provide the latitude to upskill your in-house talent all at once?

When faced with the choice of investing significant time to build competency or high cost to buy cloud-competent talent, organizations often overlook one of the most flexible and agile solutions to address shortfalls in personnel. With a cloud-managed service provider, organizations can lease the talent they need, when they need it.

Today’s cloud-capable managed service providers offer competitive support solutions specifically tailored to the needs of your organization’s cloud journey, providing you with the agility to achieve your business objectives exactly when you need to achieve them.

By including cloud managed services as a tool within your holistic cloud adoption journey, you can plan for short and long-term human scale, surge the talent you need for critical milestones, and support your cloud architectures while you focus on solving business problems.

When a cloud managed service provider supports your cloud infrastructure, you gain the freedom to strategically plan and implement a cloud competency journey to solve in-house talent gaps. As your organization grows in cloud competency, managed services can be diverted to new solutions, or scaled back as needed.

Deep Blue Cloud Computing provides elastic talent for your modern elastic cloud architectures. Designed for the speed of cloud, our talent solutions are cloud-native, built for agility, and provide flexible support models for organizations of all sizes. Our cloud-managed services bridge operational talent gaps for short and long-term objectives, increasing business agility, ensuring operational resiliency, and buying time for organizations to address talent shortfalls.

While Deep Blue maintains deep competencies in AWS technologies, we also believe in a technology-agnostic philosophy that allows us to support the native and 3rd party solutions best aligned with your business objectives. We have deep experience providing cloud migrations, technology transformations, and managed services support for small and large businesses. Where other cloud-managed service providers focus their goals on capturing long-term, rigid contracts, Deep Blue believes in partnering for agility to enable and achieve your business goals.

Our Elastic Talent support models can help your business address broad architectural support needs or provide service-specific competencies across AI, machine learning, cybersecurity, and other advanced specializations. From broad cloud platform management to hyper-innovative talent augmentation, Deep Blue can design a cloud-management program to augment existing talent, provide short—and long-term oversight for solutions, or operate your cloud platform as a turnkey service.

Deep Blue knows your business is unique, but your challenges don’t have to be solved alone. Book a meeting today to explore how we can solve your technical challenges while you drive business outcomes.