An Insight-commissioned survey by IDG Research highlights the strategic role of IT to businesses and the IT transformation journey underway.
The business is reliant on IT to achieve its goals.
98% of IT leaders said IT is critical or very important to business strategy.
IT leaders are focused on 4 key business strategies:
- Increase operational efficiency.
- Improve customer experience.
- Increase agility to support business demands.
- Transform to a digital business model.
Top 2 actions IT will take to support business strategies:
- Increase speed of IT service delivery.
- Leverage new technology platforms (public/private/hybrid clouds, converged infrastructure, etc.)
IT optimization challenges still loom.
But, some year-over-year progress has been made.
22% believe their IT environment is fully optimized — up from 9% in 2016.
IT innovation is key. Yet, budget allocations don’t currently reflect it.
56% of respondents rate the challenge of funding and supporting innovative/business advancing projects as extremely challenging.
66% of the budget goes toward keeping the lights on. 34% goes toward innovation. Funding for innovation is expected to increase to 45% in the next two years.
IT leaders are using a multicloud strategy, with workloads evenly split 50% on private cloud and 50% on public cloud.
Yet, organizations continue to struggle with choosing best-fit cloud platforms for workloads.
More than half of respondents (52%) have moved one or more workloads away from the public cloud to an on-premise platform, compared to 38% in 2016.
Top challenges when deciding best-fit cloud platforms for workloads:
- Determining security requirements
- Defining data storage requirements
- Building a strategy across multiple locations
- Determining data access requirements
- Assessing growth requirements
- Determining compliance requirements
Top four reasons for moving workloads away from the public cloud to an on-premise platform:
- Level of control over resources or data
- Meeting compliance requirements
- Reliability/performance issues
- Security concerns or event
When deciding to move particular applications or workloads to a public cloud, 3/4 of IT organizations report being more cautious than they were one year ago.
Top reasons for increased caution include security requirements and the changing threat landscape.
IT leaders plan to leverage third parties to assess workloads in 3 key areas:
- Determining compliance requirements
- Assessing growth/scalability requirements
- Performing application interdependency analysis