More than 70% of IT leaders across the globe still view the skills gap as an urgent concern, despite the tech industry's noise around its efforts to mitigate the rampant skills shortage, according to new data from IDC.

The IDC survey commissioned by Amazon Web Services and Cloudreach compiled data from 610 IT business leaders at large enterprises across various industries in Europe and North America. Nearly half, or 46% of those surveyed, said the skills shortage is slowing them down, and 9% see this issue posing an existential crisis for their company.

“This research confirms that there is a shortage of cloud talent today, threatening cloud transformation projects that are essential to business survival,” Cloudreach CEO Brooks Borcherding said in a statement. Organizations are challenged to develop new methods of recruiting, hiring, and upskilling talent, along with eliminating barriers of entry into cloud careers that tend to limit diversity, like requiring a four-year degree.

Insufficient supply of cloud skills also hinders innovation — the talent shortage makes it harder for 34% of respondents to operate and launch services — and leads to high staff turnover and wage inflation, according to IDC. The top three job areas impacted by this are multi-cloud capabilities, cloud system development, and cloud governance.

The skills shortage is expected to continue to pervade the industry and spark a competitive recruitment atmosphere. "With fewer skilled workers than open jobs, and growing demand on the horizon, cloud organizations will fight to maintain their teams and operations," the report reads.

This research also illustrates the crucial role cloud plays for businesses aiming to reduce their carbon emissions — 71% of IT leaders see cloud strategy as the biggest driver of sustainability today, and IDC expects that figure to rise to 85% in 2023.

"Enterprises consume less energy and reduce their environmental footprint when migrating to a cloud environment," IDC analyst Carla Arend said in a statement. But to create meaningful impacts, "sustainability practices need to be embedded in the enterprise business processes," and these efforts need to push beyond just tracking CO2 emissions or energy consumption and instead prioritize sustainability "across the entire asset lifecycle," Arend said.

The survey also outlined the various benefits IT leaders expect from implementing SusOps. Increased company brand reputation, also known as good old fashioned positive PR, was identified as the primary benefit of sustainability initiatives by 58% of respondents.

Other welcomed outcomes include increased customer satisfaction (54%), reduced costs (45%), better talent attraction and retention opportunities (36%), and improved value proposition of products and services (34%). Less than 1% see no benefits to SusOps other than those related to compliance.

For organizations to successfully reduce costs through sustainability efforts, they first must understand their cloud carbon footprint baseline and then take targeted actions, like deleting idle cloud instances, to eliminate emissions, according to the report. Sustainability must become a key metric for both developers and stakeholders across daily and broader cloud decision-making "to lead to a flow-on effect of governing and controlling cloud spend overall," IDC analysts concluded.