With Cloud Skills now the demand of the Industry what does hiring post Covid look Like?

India has witnessed a major technology transformation in the last five years and has emerged as the second-fastest digital adopter. In the digital economy, data and software are the governments' and enterprises' secret sauce. The post-COVID-19 era will be a new reality focused on much more digitally connected components. While different industries and markets across the globe would be on different growth trajectories and acceleration into this uncharted future, all will exist in a much more digitally connected world. And in all this, it is the Cloud, network, and modern IT infrastructure that will enable the governments across the world as well as the enterprises to navigate the new reality driven by data at the core.

The public cloud is a multi-tenant environment, which offers rapid elasticity and high scalability with the capability to consume resources on a pay-per-use basis. Governments and enterprises are planning gradually to completely integrate its conventional systems with these computing technologies. Historically, the 2008 financial collapse was when the Cloud got its big shot and the Covid-19 has raised the bar of further adoption, with the revenue for Cloud infrastructure services registering growth to $29 billion during the first quarter of 2020, a 39% increase compared to 2019 (Synergy Research).

Substantial investments are being done for the adoption of next-generation technologies such as 5G, M2M, IoT and Cloud for creating credible digital communications infrastructure, which includes internet backbone, fixed broadband, mobile communications, Cloud computing and data centres. With millions of people working remotely due to nation-wide lockdown in many countries, it has caused major pressure on the residential, commercial and municipal infrastructure. Both employees and consumers expect higher bandwidths, better solutions and have lower tolerances for performance issues and outages.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is expected to grow by 24% in 2020 owing to data centre consolidation.

The need to remotely work is bolstering this demand for Cloud services. SaaS-based collaboration tools are becoming the default way of how remote employees collaborate. It is also predicted that enterprises will start modernising legacy applications while at the same time embracing the exponential growth expected in the number of next-generation applications in the public Cloud, from around 335 million in the world today, to up to 800 million applications by 2025.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic. -Peter Drucker

When extraordinary events upend entire businesses across the globe, the agility, flexibility and speed in utilizing available technology becomes the major differentiator and enables enterprises to sail through the eye of the storm, even thrive in the long run! Until now, most Cloud migrations have been part of wider, digital transformation strategies, such as, for tapping into a new market or shift in customer segment from B2B to B2B2C/B2C.

In such projects, Cloud migration majorly is focused on front-end, customer-centric applications, enabling scale and agility to add new features. But the crisis response compels enterprises to take a tactical rather than strategic approach to Cloud migration initiatives. For example, with the sudden nationwide lockdown and its extensions to contain the pandemic, providers of online learning experienced skyrocketing user surges. The one’s already on Cloud could scale elastically and thrived. Industries such as travel and hospitality which saw a sharp decrease in its customer base, scaled down their systems and operating costs accordingly, demonstrating how a tactical move to the Cloud can help businesses optimize and address crucial imbalances between cost and revenue.

Enterprises who did not have a Cloud strategy, are now frantically transitioning their operating models to incorporate remote working capabilities by making business critical applications and technology infrastructure available on the Cloud as soon as possible. This is definitely a remarkable inflection point as there has been a massive shift in the budget spending priorities towards security and Cloud services with industry’s move towards Cloud migration with two years’ worth of digital transformation being concentrated into the past two months.

With over 94% of Fortune 1000 experiencing Covid-19 disruption, majority of enterprises are actively managing cash flow and cutting down expenses just to survive.  Instead of investing in upgrading older infrastructure and data centres, Cloud offers a great way to satisfy near-term demand for digital services and gain infrastructure cost savings of up to 19%, on average. In the context of Cloud, enterprises that can migrate quickly, scale as needed, and launch new services to address new market demands will gain a considerable advantage.

Widening Skill Gap

With Cloud being a key part of enterprises’ digital transformation strategy, there will be greater demand for Cloud architects and Cloud IT admins in the post-COVID-19 new normal. Enterprises are finding dearth of professionals with Cloud skills to match their monetary investment in Cloud platforms. According to IT decision-makers, Cloud computing is the second most challenging hiring area in the world as generic Cloud computing expertise isn’t enough for an engineer or architect. It’s imperative that Cloud professionals have current skill sets and train on the platforms they engage with regularly. Traditional IT roles that can translate to Cloud careers include systems engineer, network engineer and database administrator. One of the fastest-growing positions is Cloud engineer, and, three of the top five positions are Cloud security, Cloud architecture and Cloud engineer.

Over the next five years, we estimate that the global workforce can absorb around 149 million new technology-oriented jobs. Software development accounts for the largest single share of this forecast, but roles in related fields like data analysis, cyber security, and privacy protection are also poised to grow substantially.

By Dr. Rishi Bhatnagar, Chairman - IET Future Tech Panel and Shekhar Sanyal, Country Head and Director - IET India