4. More CIOs will have to bridge a cloud skills gap 

We know, we know: “Skills gap” isn’t a cheery phrase for the holiday season. But the competition for talent remains fierce. That’s especially true in the big, broad category of cloud skills and roles.

“As digital transformation momentum increases, organizations are looking for DevOps, site reliability engineering, and cloud monitoring/management skill sets, but will struggle to find or compete for the talent,” Singh says.

OpsRamp recently conducted a survey in which 60 percent of IT pros said that the majority of their organization’s applications are either built or run in hybrid cloud architectures. The problem: Those organizations are finding it as tough as ever to hire the necessary skills for those cloud environments: 90 percent of respondents said the skills gap is either “somewhat big,” “quite big,” or “huge.” Roughly one in three said they believed that the current demand for cloud-native technology skills, in particular, outstrips the current supply in the hiring market.

Singh thinks IT leaders will try to address hiring challenges more proactively in 2019: “There will be some shift toward internal reskilling or service providers to fill the gap,” he says.

5. Cloud data management becomes a hotter topic

As cloud computing goes, so does the need for cloud management. In the year ahead, Singh anticipates cloud data management to be an increasing area of focus within the overall cloud management space, in large part because of the need for greater planning and optimization in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

“Data availability and quality is the fundamental driver of effective optimization, so data management in the cloud will also emerge as a significant trend,” Singh says. “Data will need to be aggregated and analyzed across multi-cloud environments for deeper contextual understanding of the enterprise IaaS environment. Data appliances for cloud management will [also] see increased growth.”

[ Learn the do's and don’ts of cloud migration: Get the free eBook, Hybrid Cloud for Dummies. ]

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