Customers of Red Hat Inc. are increasingly opting for a hybrid approach as their preferred cloud strategy, but doing so isn’t always easy: A large number of them admit to struggling to attract staff with the right skills to make it happen.

That’s one of the main takeaways from Red Hat’s 2020 Global Customer Tech Outlook, a survey of 876 of its biggest customers released today.

Red Hat reports that 31% of them say the term “hybrid” best describes their cloud strategy, with 21% more leaning toward a private cloud approach. Perhaps surprisingly, just 4% say public cloud is their first choice, with 6% opting for “multicloud,” based on two or more public cloud platforms. Most worrisome, some 12% appear to have no cloud strategy at all, saying simply they have “no plans to focus on cloud.”

As to why hybrid is so popular, Red Hat customers cited the cost benefits, data integration and data security as the main advantages.

Those advantages can be had only if companies have the right information technology skills in place, but that seems to be a problem for many of Red Hat’s customers. Skill-set and talent gaps were cited by 11% of customers as the top barrier preventing them from being successful in their digital transformation. A larger 17% cited challenges around technical debt, while 11% said a lack of automation was their biggest concern. In each of those cases, though, it would seem to boil down to those companies not having the right skills in place to deal with those challenges.

At least most customers seem to be aware that this is a problem, with 16% citing technical skills training and another 16% pointing to establishing a digital transformation strategy as their biggest non-IT funding priority.

Aside from the cloud, Red Hat’s customers are showing a keen interest in new technology trends such as artificial intelligence. Some 30% said they are either already using or plan to adopt AI or machine learning within the next 12 months.

Blockchain was the most popular emerging tech in last year’s Red Hat customer survey, but it seems to have lost its luster somewhat as just 12% of companies indicated an interest this time. But trends such as serverless computing (21%) and the “internet of things” (19%) are both growing in popularity.

“Getting their existing IT infrastructure in order will be a prerequisite to larger digital transformation initiatives,” Red Hat said in conclusion. “While this is happening, a majority of these organizations are continuing to pursue hybrid cloud, and a lesser but still strong number of organizations are pursuing private cloud-first over those exclusively using public clouds. And you can’t forget the people, whether it’s up-leveling skills or transforming the organization itself.”

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