The dearth of IT professionals with cloud skills is taking a big hit on organizations’ ability to meet their goals of transformation initiatives. That’s according to the OpsRamp skills crisis survey, “From A Cloud-Native Skills Gap to a Full-Blown Crisis.” The survey results were shared at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2018, being held December 3-6 in Las Vegas.

In fact, according to the OpsRamp survey, 90 percent of hiring managers identified their digital skills gap as somewhat big (46 percent), quite big (38 percent) and huge (10 percent). A measly 10 percent said that their skills gap is manageable without changing their current team. OpsRamp, is a service-centric AIOps platform for the modern enterprise.

Furthermore, 94 percent of the OpsRamp respondents report difficulty in finding qualified candidates with skills in DevOps/SRE (33 percent), multicloud management (24 percent) and cloud-native development (22 percent).

A total of 124 respondents participated in the survey. The respondents are IT manager level and above and work across IT operations, DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering teams at companies with more than 500 employees.

The report identifies the top three survey insights as: finding great talent is tough; the skills deficit is real; and enterprise transformation starts with the right culture.

An important finding in the OpsRamp survey is that, in addition to making investments to enhance their digital DNA, managed service providers (MSPs) will play a critical role in filling the talent gap.

When asked about working with MSPs to overcome the skills gaps, 58 percent of respondents plan to work with MSPs in a hybrid model, meaning that they’ll shift certain specialized workloads to MSPs and reskill internal teams for business-critical services. Another 19 percent of respondents plan to increase outsourcing to MSPs, while 23 percent plan on shifting workloads from MSPs to reskilled internal teams.

“Managed service providers will play a critical role in helping enterprises evolve their core digital capabilities at a rapid pace,” according to the report. MSPs will help businesses transform their legacy processes to help meet changing consumer demands and to seize disruptive opportunities.

More than 25 percent of hiring managers find it takes more than three months to find the right job candidate. Another 69 percent reported that they typically find the desired job candidate in one to three months. Only 5.6 percent of survey respondents report finding a hire in less than one month.

So, what are these survey respondents doing to attract talent?

All but 3 percent are throwing more money at the problem. Sixty-nine percent of respondents are very willing or willing to pay more for skilled IT professionals, while another 27 percent are somewhat willing.

Why? “The digital economy is constantly throwing up new business and operating models that can disrupt the status quo or make your unique advantages obsolete,” the report author states.

Respondents also noted that that they’re bracing for a continued battle for talent by investing in existing staff via combination of programs, including internally run programs (62 percent), self-directed trainings (61 percent) and external education program (53 percent).

Thirty-seven percent of IT executives said that they have plans to invest in skill development programs for existing staff as a way to embrace automation and foster a digital culture.

However, investments alone can’t change a company’s culture, and IT leaders polled in the survey stated that preconceived attitudes of their employees aren’t changing as fast as the trajectory of the organization — and that impedes advancing digital business strategies.

“Stifling innovation” and “limiting abilities in adopting new technologies” followed the top three challenges, underscoring the need to invest in cultural change for successful enterprise transformation.