A recent whitepaper from IDC sponsored by Microsoft has suggested a widening skills gap for cloud computing, and the trend will continue further through 2013.

In particular the research, of over 600 organisations, showed that as the cloud evolves, cloud-specific skills will grow at six times the rate of overall IT skills, noting that cloud-related skills “represent virtually all of the growth opportunities in IT worldwide”.

According to the paper, worldwide IT jobs will hit just under 30m by the end of 2015; however the 22.3m non-cloud jobs represent a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 0% from 2011, as opposed to the 7m cloud-related jobs having a 26% CAGR, going up from 2.7m in 2011.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, broken down into demographics North America is where the most cloud-oriented jobs will be in 2015 (2.7m), representing a 22% growth over four years. Asia/Pacific (2.3m, 32 …