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More than four in five (82%) of UK IT leaders believe they are not fully ready to move to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers because of a shortage of in-house skills, with Microsoft Azure as the most trusted IaaS provider.

The research, commissioned by Reconnix, found that despite the general air of reticence moving apps from traditional servers to the cloud was at least a high or medium priority for 88% of those polled.

Yet there’s a problem – and it’s the dreaded skills gap again. Only 7% of respondents were confident they had all the required skills in their team to run IaaS environments. Overall more than half (59%) said they had only some of the required skills, no skills at all, or did not know.

As for the vendors themselves, Microsoft Azure was considered the most trusted IaaS provider. 36% of respondents chose it ahead of IBM (22%) and Amazon Web Services (14%). Steve Nice, the CTO of Reconnix, described this facet as “surprising” by virtue of Amazon’s market share – yet recent market research shows Microsoft is winning the race for second place in IaaS and closing Amazon’s share.

“There’s a very clear desire for businesses to move applications away from traditional environments and towards infrastructure as a service providers, however a lack of adequate skills seem to be holding back many IT departments from making this move,” Nice said.

“It’s natural for businesses to err on the side of caution, but this conservative approach can mean that many are missing out on the transformative benefits of the cloud.”

Respondents claimed cost savings were the single biggest motivator of moving to the cloud with 32% of the vote, with greater flexibility (30%) and increased compute power (18%) also popular.