Understanding cloud environments and making decisions about multi-cloud management can be complex.

IT leaders are looking for cost transparency and integration across multiple services and providers. Especially as they transition to an increasingly complex distributed multi-cloud world where applications run on different clouds, with some applications running on more than one cloud in hybrid mode.

This means they need to move to the ‘evolution phase’ in their cloud strategy, using an entirely new architectural approach. They’re looking at new ways to deploy, monitor, and operate environments using modern technologies, such as containers, serverless, edge computing and machine learning. To succeed in these distributed cloud environments, IT teams, whether working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or VMware, will rapidly need a new set of skills to excel.

As you break down the traditional build-and-operate barriers and open up new possibilities to accelerate innovation, you need more than the traditional Managed Service Provider (MSP) models constrained by the boundaries of the past. Instead, it pays to understand how to scale your IT organisation in an agile world, how to transform your environments and how to streamline your operating models.

To do that IT leaders need access to highly skilled and certified cloud experts to work alongside their teams to help drive the organisation’s cloud outcomes, while continuously evolving their environment.

In Rackspace Technology’s multi-cloud Annual Research Report 2022, we found that organisations’ cloud priorities are evolving, from 'basics' such as agility (30%) and scalability (26%) and moving towards more sophisticated issues such as security (46%) and compliance (36%). Moreover, an increased appetite for risk among IT professionals can be seen in their enthusiasm for exploring edge technologies (38%) and containers (53%), while over half plan to invest in hyperscale providers. 

The survey also found that there is a growing talent dilemma for IT leaders, with more than half (53%) of all respondents citing talent shortages as a major business challenge, well ahead of concerns such as inflation (48%), product shortages (36%) and wage growth (25%).

Companies are employing a variety of tactics to attract new IT talent, including promoting opportunities for training and development (40%), increasing starting salaries and offering hybrid/flexible/work-from-home schedules (32%). 21% are being even more aggressive, luring talent with large starting salaries or increases, while 18% are offering signing bonuses and 13% are using sign-on retention agreements.

This reactive recruitment strategy will no doubt have an impact on longer term operational expenditure costs. So, what’s the solution? In an ideal world you need on-demand access to the cloud expertise your business requires. Cloud specialists who can work as an extension of your team, as part of a modern, highly collaborative support model, shaping your outcomes as you evolve to cloud native.

Elastic Engineering Plus is one of the leading cloud services, built specifically to support those business requirements. We provide your business with on-demand access to a team of highly skilled engineers – collectively called a ‘Pod’ – who are available to collaborate with your organisation to shape successful outcomes such as:

• Planning and migrations to Public Cloud.
• Architecture design and deployment.
  
• Creation of automated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Improved security and reliability for your applications.
• Manage cloud environments across AWS, GCP and Azure.

BT delivers Professional Services as part of their partnership with us, Rackspace Technology. Together we can offer our customers something different. We bring the network, security and cloud together, so you can take advantage of the multi-cloud and be prepared with the best practices that accelerate the adoption and benefits of cloud. Ensuring that our customers build the right network to support their multi-cloud strategies, wherever they may be in that journey.

Together, we have global reach and scale, with security operation centres (SOCs) around the world and over 3,000 dedicated security experts, integration expertise backed up by our extensive cloud certifications, and credentials and access to leading technology through our respective partner ecosystems, meaning that we can offer single source solutions making our customers lives easier.