Addressing delegates W.Media’s Middle East Cloud and Data Center Market Insights 2021 in a panel titled ‘Cloud Computing & Data Centre priorities & outlook for a new decade’, the issue came to the forefront, especially in a region that has some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds.
“One of the most important things that we need to look at is the skill gap or talent shortage that exists in any part of the world, especially here in GCC. One thing which we have seen is that ever since the pandemic began, everyone has been trying to move the workload to the cloud.
Requirements have been coming in from small and medium enterprises toward the MNCs who are trying to migrate the workloads and trying to find out which workload can be moved where, when and in what kind of a time frame.
Along with this what came up is the shortage of cloud management in terms of manageability because cloud management is not like anything else. There are various security and vulnerability issues which revolve around cloud management,” said Jayakumar Mohanachandran, Group CIO, Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group. The Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group (ESAG) is one of UAE’s most eminent family businesses with 27 companies in its portfolio. With a history dating back to 1960, the Group is partnered with leading brands in various areas of enterprise across wide-ranging industry and consumer sectors.
He further added that one thing which is important to note is that there will be a decrease in visibility and control because what we have today on-premise tomorrow when it moves to cloud we really don’t know what is happening on the other side.
We also are not aware of the other areas. For example, the data residing on-premise we have full control over that as compared to when it is moved to the cloud.
For example, iCloud if we delete something from iCloud we are never really sure if that is deleted completely. Such factors trigger the skill gap in terms of cloud management.
“We have seen Microsoft or AWS and all of these companies coming up with a lot of initiatives. Microsoft has launched a cloud society as well and has trained about 150 thousand IT professionals in the Middle East and Africa.
There are multiple programs that are happening from the principal. This is not something that we are trying to move the responsibility from our side to CSP.
It is important that we skill our resources because there are a lot of risk elements that might come up during this journey. We need to make sure that the cloud management and our people are skilled, particularly our team members and technology leaders.
It is their responsibility to capitalise the training and courses and the people are reskilled and trained well in the respective technologies so that the process of migration is hassle free,” added Mohanachandran.
