The utilities sector is struggling with an ageing workforce and lacks critical cloud skills

About three quarters of utilities see moving their on-premise apps and workloads into the public cloud as a dominant component in their IT strategies, according to a recent IDC survey. But Gaia Gallotti, research manager at IDC Energy Insights told BCN the firms need to first overcome a pretty significant skills gap and an ageing workforce if they are to modernise their systems.

According to the survey, which polled 38 international senior utility executives, the vast majority of respondents are sold on the benefits cloud could bring to their IT strategies.  About 87 per cent said cloud services provide better business continuity and disaster recovery than traditional technology, and 74 per cent said public cloud migration will be dominant within their broader IT strategy.

Interestingly, while 76 per cent of respondents believe cloud providers can offer better security and data privacy controls than their own IT organisation,  63 per cent said ceding control to a cloud provider is a barrier to their organisation’s adoption of cloud services.

“The utilities industry can no longer afford to deny the advantages of ‘going into the cloud.’ As security concerns are further debunked, utilities expect to see a significant push in their cloud strategy maturity in the next 24 months, so much so that they expect to make up lost ground and even supersede other industries,” Gallotti said.

But most also believe internal IT skillsets not up to speed with new cloud standards, methodologies, and topologies. 74 per cent said they will need a third-party professional services firm to help develop a public cloud strategy.

“This is a huge problem the industry is facing, but not exclusively for cloud services. Utilities are struggling to attract talent in all IT domains, especially for the ‘third platform’, as they compete with companies in the IT world that attract ‘Generation Y’ talent more easily,” Gallotti explained.

“The utilities industry also has an issue with aging workforce outside of IT and across its other business units. In the short term, we expect utilities to rely more on their service providers to fill skills gap that emerge, in the hope of more easily attracting the right talent as the industry transforms and becomes more appealing to Gen Y.”