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A recent study showed that 58 per cent of channel partners believe that up to a fifth (20 per cent) of their customers' cloud investment is being wasted.
Canalys surveyed 146 channel partners worldwide with more than 80 per cent saying their customer's investment is not being fully used.
Complexity and uncontrolled user access to cloud technologies has led to customers under-using paid-for services and not fully realising the return on investment (ROI), found Canalys.
“The main role for channel partners after migrating and integrating customer workloads to a hybrid environment will be giving them greater visibility into available cloud resources to optimise use," Canalys research analyst Daniel Liu said.
"This will be driven by analytics and, in future, machine learning to identify the optimal cloud package or subscription. But the skills needed for workload cloud migration, consumption monitoring, billing analytics, cloud consultation and integration services are in short supply,” said Liu.
Global spending on cloud infrastructure services has grown 47 per cent in the first quarter of 2018, reaching US$17 billion.
The leader board was unchanged according to data from the latest Canalys report with Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintaining more than 30 per cent of market share.
AWS' revenue is nearly double that of Microsoft, however Microsoft has been growing faster than AWS, specifically, Microsoft cloud revenue was up 93 per cent while AWS was up 49 per cent during the quarter.
Google remains third with just over five per cent of market share having grown 89 per cent in cloud revenue, posting a total US$1.2 billion.
In February, a research from Synergy Research Group put Alibaba on the top five cloud infrastructure services market share for the first time.
That was a result of Alibaba’s revenue from cloud, which was US$553 million for the fourth quarter of the 2017 calendar year.
