What’s Missing in Your Move to the Cloud? - Invest in the Right AWS Skills

Now more than ever, organizations are investing in cloud technology. It is estimated that by 2025, 80% of organizations will use some cloud-based system, and global cloud expenditures will reach 70% of the budget for IT services by the end of 2020. Sadly, not all organizations can successfully achieve their goals when undergoing a large-scale digital transformation. Research from McKinsey suggests that only 30% do succeed. Why is that?

We talk with Martijn van de Grift, Cloud expert, consultant, and trainer from Xebia. He shares a few of his insights on the challenges organizations face when moving to the cloud and how challenge-driven learning could be a solution for your upskilling needs.

The Lack of Cloud Experience and Skills Leads to High Costs.

Upskilling is critical for a successful digital transformation. People tend to limit their focus to the technologies they know, which creates a significant barrier when the business wants to move to the cloud. Without the correct training or context, people may fail to realize what a specific transformation will bring them.

By starting with upskilling your people, you prepare them for the transformation. I think this is the way to engage your people and make the transformation you want to achieve more effective.

People Will Fail to Realize The Goals of a Digital Transformation

Most organizations start the whole process of transitioning to the cloud by migrating their applications to the cloud in a lift-and-shift kind of fashion. This is when an organization's data is essentially copy-pasted from on-premise storage to a cloud provider.

Many organizations consider this strategy as a fast and cost-effective solution. However, with this cloud migration strategy, IT professionals lack the expertise needed to take full advantage of the benefits offered by the cloud. As a result, the cost of their infrastructure ends up higher than it was before.

Furthermore, all major Cloud Service Providers have a Shared Repositiblity Model. In essence, this means that the provider is responsible for the security of the cloud. While you, the consumer, are responsible for the security in the cloud. This means that moving to the cloud in itself doesn't make your IT services more secure.

Here are some real cases of how a cloud storage bucket led to data leaks:

• NEW TECH: WhiteHat Security tackles' dangling buckets,' other new web app exposures
• KidsGuard stalkerware leaks data on secretly surveilled victims
• Rotherwood Healthcare AWS bucket security fail left elderly patients' DNR choices freely readable online
• The latest government data breaches in 2019/2020 | The Daily Swig
• How hackers breach unlocked cloud server databases - The Washington Post

All of these cases would have been avoided if the organizations did not have a shortage of the necessary cloud skills and misconfiguration since buckets are private by default.

Distracted When Learning by Videos.

The route an IT professional takes to learning a new technology is as follows. They start by reading documentation or by creating a new account. Then, follow a 'getting started' and create a 'Hello World' kind of application. After this, your professionals begin searching for the next steps to deepen their knowledge of a tool, buying an online or classroom course. Many organizations are already taking on the initiative to upskill their IT professionals by providing a catalog for video-based learning subscriptions, classroom training, and resources for knowledge sharing between colleagues.

While video-based learning is a great starting point, for me, this isn't the best way to learn. If I have to watch hours of videos online, I'll quickly increase the playback speed, and after a short while, I get distracted very easily.

Even if I've watched the full thing, most of the time, I think. Okay, but how am I suppose to use this? It's only till I actually used a service or product that I really see how it works and what I can use it for at work.

An Effective and Engaging Way To Upskill Your IT Professionals.

By creating small challenges that solve real-world problems, new topics and concepts become relevant. I see this in the feedback I'm getting from my learners from my cloud training. They like the interactive approach, and they have the feeling they could start using what they've learned the next day.

Why I Use Instruqt to Enrich My Training for IT Professionals

I don't think anyone likes a "Death by PowerPoint" kind of training. I often see that students have no clue how they should use the new things they've learned at the training. By leveraging the challenge-driven learning via Instruqt, they can apply what they've learned immediately in a sandbox environment. This allows a student to get a better understanding of the subject, which leads to more confidence while using it.

What sets Instruqt apart from its competitors is that the tracks challenge its users. I've seen enough examples where a training "lab" is more like a walkthrough, where you can just copy-paste the answers. I think this is missing the point since a student doesn't know what he's copy-pasting.

Besides this, since Instruqt creates a sandbox environment, I'm not wasting time on students trying to develop new accounts, and I don't need to give my students access to my personal accounts.

Instruqt — Changing the face of IT learning

So we think this digital consultant can be a game-changer. A new way of learning, a new way of providing value to clients and providing value to those professionals that, by the way, are having to learn everything again. A scalable learning model for organization-wide transformations. We’ve put together is an online modern, learn by doing, challenge-driven gamification platform. Changing the game for your IT professionals and your teams.

Proudly a part of the Xebia Group

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