Cloud Academy for Business

The Biggest Challenges for Technology Leaders

This is the second of two blog posts covering insights Cloud Academy gleaned from our recently published 2021 Technology Leadership Survey.

In our first post, Ben Keylor talked about the lay of the land in 2021: A business world already rapidly accelerating toward cloud infrastructure for its speed and agility, given an extra turbo boost due to the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We saw that enterprises are having a hard time figuring out how to upskill and hire effectively, with there being a huge overhead for both – especially onboarding new talent to achieve your teams’ goals.

But still, even with the inherent costs of hiring, getting the right people to help you keep innovating is still the number-one priority of managers for the rest of the year. So what other concerns do tech leaders have for 2021 and beyond?

What are tech leaders’ main worries and challenges?

We asked this very question to our survey respondents. At the time of asking, Q1 of 2021 had just wrapped up, and we wanted to know their main pain points as they looked ahead to the rest of the year and 2022.

Not surprisingly, keeping tabs on their security posture and regulatory compliance rank at the top of respondents’ concerns. But right up there with security and compliance are concerns about transformational activities and the talent to reach those objectives.

Cloud migration and other transformational activities

At just over 20%, concerns about big moves such as cloud migration are a huge deal for our respondents. This makes sense, as regardless of if you’re an enterprise or a large consultant tasked to coach an enterprise, the need is the same: you’ll have to bring a great deal of technical knowledge combined with a convincing effort to enact culture change.

This type of organizational-level technical knowledge is best held together with a good, sharable structure. We dive deeply into just that through a five-step process for migrations in our Cloud Migration series. The steps are:

  1. Define your strategy
  2. Start planning
  3. Assess readiness
  4. Adopt a cloud-first mindset
  5. Manage and iterate

Coming in third behind security/compliance and digital transformation, 18% of respondents say that their talent isn’t up to par in order to reach business objectives. As we dug more into the data, we found that people surveyed from companies with 500-1,000 employees worry about insufficient talent at a rate 2.5 times higher than those with a workforce greater than 1,000. What might cause this? It’s a hunch, but it could be that these mid-market companies more acutely feel the strain of competition from larger enterprises who have more access to resources and talent.

Join our chat about the full survey results

The full results of the 2021 Technology Leadership Survey provide many more key insights around enterprise investment in the cloud, current IT architectures, and the biggest technology concerns facing tech leaders today.

Join Cloud Academy’s interactive webinar on June 30th at 9 a.m. PT | 12 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. CET. Attendees will be asked polling questions to see how their results compare to survey respondents’, and we’ll dive into what the results mean for you and your business. Don’t miss out!

Cloud Academy Team

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