An overwhelming majority of business leaders are shifting focus to application modernization to gain an edge in their markets, according to a new survey by IDG company Foundry, commissioned by Insight Enterprises, a Fortune 500 solutions integrator helping clients accelerate their digital journey. Respondents included 400 senior IT and business decision makers employed at companies with 1,500 or more employees across a wide range of industries.

87% of respondents to the new survey cited modernizing critical applications as a key success driver — with driving competitive advantage as the number one reason for app modernization.

The survey, The Path to Digital Transformation: Where Leaders Stand in 2023, also revealed major challenges encountered by organizations at this juncture in their digital transformation journey — underscoring the renewed focus on building a stronger groundwork application environments. Among the findings:

■ 91% rely on multiple public cloud providers for different workloads, but respondents continue to grapple with multicloud strategy. In fact, 20% also plan to repatriate select public cloud workloads to an on-premises model over the next 12 months. In a related finding, 54% of data at respondents’ organizations, on average, now resides in a public or hybrid cloud.

■ 86% report their organization has been impacted by technical debt over the past 12 months; the top areas affected are the ability to innovate (43%), meet SLAs (41%) and avoid downtime (37%).

■ 72% state that data volumes are growing faster than their ability to manage them, leading 64% to rank implementation of a data governance program to improve data management as their top data-related objective this year. This links directly to respondents’ view that data governance is the #1 barrier to achieving business value from data.

■ 51% report having been impacted by a cybersecurity breach over the past 12 months, with 49% requiring one week or more to recover. Just 20% resolved the issue in one day and 31% in multiple days but less than a week.

Nevertheless, respondents indicated significant digital transformation progress in several areas — signaling an opportunity for stragglers to shift their strategies in the coming year. For example:

■ 35% of the average organization’s data estate is now driven by edge workloads, with 29% of respondents reporting that at least 50% of data volumes now reside on the edge. 64% expect that to increase in the next 12 months.

■ 85% indicate their organization is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to some degree to drive business insights and/or efficiencies, although only 36% report having optimized their use of AI and Machine Learning (ML) enterprisewide with mature processes and capabilities in place.

"Digital transformation is vital for optimizing business operations, advancing initiatives, driving opportunity and combating competitive threats, but it is a massive undertaking that challenges the skills and resources of even the largest organizations," said Stan Lequin, president, Solutions, Insight North America. "As a solutions integrator that deals with these projects on a daily basis, our team of 9,000+ sales and service delivery professionals, including 5,000 engineers, architects and consultants, has helped hundreds of enterprises overcome the hurdles and lay the groundwork for achieving the competitive advantage that is critical in today’s volatile market environment."