IDC Estimates Shed Light on Cloud Skills Gap for IT

According to an IDC (News - Alert) report sponsored by Microsoft Corp., through 2015, with as many as seven million cloud-related jobs available worldwide, the demand for cloud-ready IT workers will grow by 26 percent annually. Cloud computing has already begun changing how IT delivers economic value to countries, industries, and businesses although it is still emerging as a computing style.

For existing IT approaches, business and existing revenue models, the adoption of cloud technologies is disruptive. For business opportunities, it is regarded to as a climate change in some ways. Causing extreme and unpredictable competition that comes from agility, cloud will cause the melting of barriers to IT innovation and adoption and will likely result in the rising sea level of business value and opportunity.

According to the estimates provided by IDC for 2011, since cloud computing features unique economic leverage, IT cloud services helped organizations of all sizes and all vertical sectors around the world generate $400 billion in economic benefit. During the same year, according to IDC estimates, cloud helped drive 1.5 million new jobs.

By 2030, cloud computing, as most agree, could become the key delivery model for computing. As a matter of fact, the emerging markets of Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Asia/Pacific (outside of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) will benefit from more than 40 percent of new cloud-related jobs.

Between 2011 and 2015, cloud-related jobs in those emerging markets will grow at more than 34 percent annually. With a variety of enabling technologies, cloud computing is a complex environment. In order to be successful, technical proficiency and even expert proficiency in a wide range of these technologies will be required by most organizations. Through the Microsoft (News - Alert) IT Academy, by providing training and certification, Microsoft is helping fill the future workforce pipeline.

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