When asked about their top cloud concerns, more than a quarter of IT decision-makers — 26% — said they are concerned about their staff's "skillset on dealing with cloud computing," according to new Dark Reading research.

The Dark Reading State of the Cloud report surveyed 339 IT employees of companies that use cloud computing. The respondents overwhelmingly (73%) identified security as their biggest worry, followed by cost (58%) and reliability (50%). Other top concerns included functionality limitations (10%), having too much core data on the cloud (10%), inadequate service agreements (6%), and vendors trying to sell them additional cloud services (6%).

These results reflect a current climate in which IT professionals are scrambling to find a way to secure entirely new cloud attack surfaces and make existential business decisions based on evolving technologies. They need something secure and cost-efficient, and they need it to actually work.

And having a team skilled up to manage it all would be nice, too.

Download the State of the Cloud: A Security Perspective for more details. The data used in the report comes from research jointly conducted with four other Informa Tech publications — InformationWeek, ITPro Today, Network Computing, and Data Center Knowledge.