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CIOs Target Legacy IT in Push for Digital Transformation

CIOs around the globe are more determined than ever to achieve digital transformation within their organizations despite setbacks experienced over the past year, according to a survey by Logicalis.

The survey, which polled 890 CIOs across 23 countries, unearthed surprising findings this year. Although CIOs are determined to achieve digital transformation, optimism about their strides toward success has waned over the last 12 months.

While only 11 percent report their organizations have “no desire” for transformation, those that ideologically embrace digital transformation have made only minimal advancements to date:

■ Just 5 percent classify their organizations as “digital innovators,” down from 6 percent in last year’s survey.

■ Fewer CIOs (19 percent) see their organizations as early adopters today, a step back from last year’s 22 percent.

■ However, the proportion of CIOs that characterize themselves as part of an early majority with digital transformation rose from 45 percent last year to 49 percent this year, illustrating that, despite difficulties, IT leaders are moving ahead with digital transformation plans.

Overcoming Difficulties

The main barriers to delivering digital transformation, CIOs say, include complexity, cost, culture, skills and security issues. Notably, 44 percent of CIOs cite the complexity of legacy technology as their top obstacle, while 50 percent point to cost, 56 percent name organizational culture as their largest issue, 34 percent say it’s a lack of skills, and 32 percent identify security as their biggest hurdle.

Far from discouraged, CIOs around the world have big plans for overcoming these digital transformation barriers:

■ 51 percent say they plan to replace and/or adapt existing infrastructure.

■ 51 percent plan to attempt culture change within their organizations.

■ 38 percent will address skills shortages through increased training and development.

■ 31 percent expect to invest in extra security capabilities.

“The way businesses view technology is undergoing an exciting yet fundamental shift,” says Vince DeLuca, CEO of Logicalis US. “The goal behind technology is no longer simply about implementing and managing tools that enable people to do their jobs. In a digitally transformed enterprise, it’s about giving people access to the information they need to fuel business agility and growth and to empower collaboration that will create business models no one has yet imagined. Digital transformation is the foundation upon which this new way of doing business will be built, and as this year’s Global CIO Survey indicates, IT leaders around the world not only recognize this, but they are determined to provide the platform their organizations need to embrace the change that is to come.”

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CIOs Target Legacy IT in Push for Digital Transformation

CIOs around the globe are more determined than ever to achieve digital transformation within their organizations despite setbacks experienced over the past year, according to a survey by Logicalis.

The survey, which polled 890 CIOs across 23 countries, unearthed surprising findings this year. Although CIOs are determined to achieve digital transformation, optimism about their strides toward success has waned over the last 12 months.

While only 11 percent report their organizations have “no desire” for transformation, those that ideologically embrace digital transformation have made only minimal advancements to date:

■ Just 5 percent classify their organizations as “digital innovators,” down from 6 percent in last year’s survey.

■ Fewer CIOs (19 percent) see their organizations as early adopters today, a step back from last year’s 22 percent.

■ However, the proportion of CIOs that characterize themselves as part of an early majority with digital transformation rose from 45 percent last year to 49 percent this year, illustrating that, despite difficulties, IT leaders are moving ahead with digital transformation plans.

Overcoming Difficulties

The main barriers to delivering digital transformation, CIOs say, include complexity, cost, culture, skills and security issues. Notably, 44 percent of CIOs cite the complexity of legacy technology as their top obstacle, while 50 percent point to cost, 56 percent name organizational culture as their largest issue, 34 percent say it’s a lack of skills, and 32 percent identify security as their biggest hurdle.

Far from discouraged, CIOs around the world have big plans for overcoming these digital transformation barriers:

■ 51 percent say they plan to replace and/or adapt existing infrastructure.

■ 51 percent plan to attempt culture change within their organizations.

■ 38 percent will address skills shortages through increased training and development.

■ 31 percent expect to invest in extra security capabilities.

“The way businesses view technology is undergoing an exciting yet fundamental shift,” says Vince DeLuca, CEO of Logicalis US. “The goal behind technology is no longer simply about implementing and managing tools that enable people to do their jobs. In a digitally transformed enterprise, it’s about giving people access to the information they need to fuel business agility and growth and to empower collaboration that will create business models no one has yet imagined. Digital transformation is the foundation upon which this new way of doing business will be built, and as this year’s Global CIO Survey indicates, IT leaders around the world not only recognize this, but they are determined to provide the platform their organizations need to embrace the change that is to come.”

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...