Skip to main content

Infrastructure Issues Distract CIOs Away from Business Needs

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Three-fourths (75 percent) of CIO respondents stated their network is an issue in achieving their organization's goals, according to a new survey of CIOs worldwide from Brocade, conducted by independent research agency Vanson Bourne. For almost a quarter of CIOs polled, it is a "significant" issue.

Top findings of the Brocade Global CIO Survey 2015 include:

■ CIOs are distracted by the business of keeping the lights on. Over half spend more than 50 percent of their time reactively, citing network downtime/availability as one of the most likely reasons, especially for CIOs with more than 1,000 employees in their organization.

■ CIOs top concerns are security and fast deployment of and access to new applications and services, more than big data and analytics, communication and collaboration, or compliance with regulations.

■ The top four technology issues CIOs need to address are: operational platforms (Oracle, SAP), data center upgrade/expansion, virtual, security, network upgrade/expansion.

■ 40 percent of CIOs claim to be concerned about choosing the right vendors to deliver what the business is asking.

On the topic of cloud, the survey found:

■ Cloud is a given (90 percent have some form of cloud within their organization) but control of cloud acquisition is a different matter. Over one third of respondents state that cloud adoption without involvement from IT is not allowed but does or may happen anyway.

■ CIOs concerns about non-authorised cloud include its (negative) impact on owned infrastructure performance, inability to manage the network and IT disputes with cloud providers. These are more likely to be worries than security, compliance, poor SLAs, inability to access data or the cost to the business due to duplication of spending.

■ 83 percent of CIOs believe procurement of cloud services without IT engagement will increase.

■ 82 percent admit this leads to fears about their job security, and one in five find such activities cause them extreme stress.

When questioned what most worries them in their role, the respondents answered:

■ 79 percent of CIOs were worried about the delivery of new services to support business growth.

■ 77 percent were concerned about delivering better analytics/data mining.

■ 68 percent of CIOs were worried about improving delivery of services, with the same percentage citing fast deployment of new applications as a significant concern.

■ Reducing organizations operational expenses was a top concern for 65 percent of the respondents.

Ken Cheng, CTO and Senior VP of Corporate Development and Emerging Business for Brocade, commented, "The role of IT is changing from being an administrator of infrastructure to becoming an enabler of the business -- driving innovation and new ways of working to revolutionize customer engagement and transactional processes. More than ever, the CIO has a critical role in advising the board and senior management on strategic business investments, but legacy infrastructure remains a major roadblock, prohibiting business agility and innovation. The New IP offers a way of addressing this, enabling business objectives to be met."

Research Methodology: Vanson Bourne conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 200 CIOs from China, France, Germany, Russia, UK and the US in late 2014, to understand the challenges a modern CIO faces in today's rapidly changing IT environments. All respondents work for organizations with more than 250 employees. 81 percent of respondents work for organizations that have between 500 and 5,000 employees. A broad range of vertical industries are represented.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

Infrastructure Issues Distract CIOs Away from Business Needs

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Three-fourths (75 percent) of CIO respondents stated their network is an issue in achieving their organization's goals, according to a new survey of CIOs worldwide from Brocade, conducted by independent research agency Vanson Bourne. For almost a quarter of CIOs polled, it is a "significant" issue.

Top findings of the Brocade Global CIO Survey 2015 include:

■ CIOs are distracted by the business of keeping the lights on. Over half spend more than 50 percent of their time reactively, citing network downtime/availability as one of the most likely reasons, especially for CIOs with more than 1,000 employees in their organization.

■ CIOs top concerns are security and fast deployment of and access to new applications and services, more than big data and analytics, communication and collaboration, or compliance with regulations.

■ The top four technology issues CIOs need to address are: operational platforms (Oracle, SAP), data center upgrade/expansion, virtual, security, network upgrade/expansion.

■ 40 percent of CIOs claim to be concerned about choosing the right vendors to deliver what the business is asking.

On the topic of cloud, the survey found:

■ Cloud is a given (90 percent have some form of cloud within their organization) but control of cloud acquisition is a different matter. Over one third of respondents state that cloud adoption without involvement from IT is not allowed but does or may happen anyway.

■ CIOs concerns about non-authorised cloud include its (negative) impact on owned infrastructure performance, inability to manage the network and IT disputes with cloud providers. These are more likely to be worries than security, compliance, poor SLAs, inability to access data or the cost to the business due to duplication of spending.

■ 83 percent of CIOs believe procurement of cloud services without IT engagement will increase.

■ 82 percent admit this leads to fears about their job security, and one in five find such activities cause them extreme stress.

When questioned what most worries them in their role, the respondents answered:

■ 79 percent of CIOs were worried about the delivery of new services to support business growth.

■ 77 percent were concerned about delivering better analytics/data mining.

■ 68 percent of CIOs were worried about improving delivery of services, with the same percentage citing fast deployment of new applications as a significant concern.

■ Reducing organizations operational expenses was a top concern for 65 percent of the respondents.

Ken Cheng, CTO and Senior VP of Corporate Development and Emerging Business for Brocade, commented, "The role of IT is changing from being an administrator of infrastructure to becoming an enabler of the business -- driving innovation and new ways of working to revolutionize customer engagement and transactional processes. More than ever, the CIO has a critical role in advising the board and senior management on strategic business investments, but legacy infrastructure remains a major roadblock, prohibiting business agility and innovation. The New IP offers a way of addressing this, enabling business objectives to be met."

Research Methodology: Vanson Bourne conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 200 CIOs from China, France, Germany, Russia, UK and the US in late 2014, to understand the challenges a modern CIO faces in today's rapidly changing IT environments. All respondents work for organizations with more than 250 employees. 81 percent of respondents work for organizations that have between 500 and 5,000 employees. A broad range of vertical industries are represented.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...