In April this year Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector for cloud services giant AWS, warned of an IT skills gap that was proving a major barrier to innovation for public and private organisations alike.

“Right here, in Europe, there are 350,000 ICT specialists needed, and we need to help fill those job skills and quickly,” Carlson said.

AWS has pledged to help close the gap by reaching 100,000 individuals across the continent in 2018 through various educational activities.

But that might be little comfort to companies struggling to recruit the staff they need to successfully complete digital transformation plans now. A lack of talent is a real and current problem. A recent worldwide study by Capgemini and LinkedIn found that over half of organisations thought the digital talent gap was hampering their transformation efforts.

In the UK alone, 57% of organisations surveyed agreed that the digital talent gap was widening. The feeling is that ever more companies are fishing in the same shallow pool of skilled IT professionals. When you consider that a complete cloud team might include a cloud architect, a cloud engineer, analysts, administrators, developers and more, that’s quite a shortfall in talent.

So if that sounds like your business, what might the answer be?

1. Utilise the talent you already have

There’s a good chance that your organisation already contains the talent you need. Training and upskilling staff isn’t an instant solution, of course, but it could be a more effective one in the long run. Your current employees know your systems, processes and ways of working already. You know you can work with them. Adding AWS cloud computing certification to their skill set (for example) could simply be a logical next step.

It can cost thousands of pounds to recruit new professional staff, and some experts estimate that the majority of new hires actually fail. Why not spend some of that money upskilling employees you already know and trust?

2. Exploit hybrid cloud

While spending time and money recruiting new members of staff or training existing ones, it may feel like you’re standing still, letting competitors benefit from the scalability and flexibility of cloud computing while you plod along with legacy infrastructure.

In which case it is worth considering a hybrid cloud solution, which can combine public and private cloud with on-site hardware and systems. The advantages for a business without a fully skilled cloud computing team are considerable. To take just one example, your most sensitive workloads can remain on-site, reducing the need for dedicated cloud security expertise. Less sensitive tasks and processes can exploit the many benefits of the cloud.

In a word, hybrid cloud can allow you to dip a toe into the cloud environment, retaining the systems you know and trust until you are ready to take the next step.

John Lyons, Zen’s head of cloud and hosting, says: “Many providers - and Zen is one - take a platform agnostic, whole of market approach, offering the cloud platforms, services and applications your business needs, rather than just the ones they happen to sell. Multi-cloud providers can offer one of a range of different solutions, a hybrid package, or stand-alone services (like Office 365) that represent an easy first step towards a gradual and controlled cloud adoption.”

3. Give your headache away

Whether you choose a hybrid solution or not, one other way to bridge your cloud skills gap is to opt for a provider that offers managed cloud services.

Taking advantage of a managed cloud service means handing over much of the responsibility for the day-to-day maintenance and monitoring of operating systems, infrastructure and enterprise applications to somebody else’s experts. Security, patching and optimisation of your cloud environment can all be part of a managed cloud package.

Needless to say, handing over these tasks reduces your need for on-site cloud expertise, while also giving your IT team more time to focus on other projects.

There’s no doubt that cloud computing can be of huge benefit to mid-sized businesses, but recruiting appropriately skilled staff can be tricky. Training, hybrid cloud and managed services can all help to bridge the cloud skills gap.