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Tech Leaders Unprepared for Future IT Needs

More than half (60%) of IT leaders say their company's IT modernization program is not yet ready for the future, according to a new IBM survey in the US and UK.

Nearly a quarter of CIOs and CTOs surveyed say their company is just starting its IT modernization journey or has yet to begin modernizing, with about a third surveyed saying they are still in the midst of transformation. 380 CIOs and CTOs participated in the survey, recently completed by The State of IT Transformation Study conducted by the Managed Infrastructure Services unit of IBM's Global Technology Services division.

As a result, more than 95% of IT leaders surveyed said they are looking to adopt public, hybrid or private cloud strategies. Of those, many are moving at an aggressive pace — the study reveals that 53% of respondents are aggressively pursuing a public cloud strategy, 48% a hybrid cloud strategy and 45% a private cloud strategy.

"Our clients are looking to accelerate IT modernization by leveraging cloud models — both public and hybrid, data, AI, automation and other key technologies to help shape, scale and manage more effectively massive, complex, global architectures," said Archana Vemulapalli, GM, IBM Infrastructure Services - Offerings and CTO. "In this rapidly changing digital business environment, organizations can bring in the right technology and the right partners to help aggregate, integrate, build and maintain a scalable digital business, while also enforcing effective governance."

The pressures on IT infrastructures brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have further accelerated the need for cloud infrastructure, professional skills development, and security upgrades, the survey found. More than 60% of technology leaders surveyed say they expect increased demand for cloud infrastructure to be permanent.

Even as IT leaders are feeling increased urgency to accelerate their organizations' transformation, migrating to a multi-cloud environment can present significant challenges to organizations with legacy applications running large data pools.

Adding to this, many surveyed technology leaders are not sure they have the right teams in place. A full 40% of survey respondents do not feel their teams have the right skills to fully meet their IT ambitions, and more than three in four surveyed say they will rely more on trusted partners that can provide managed infrastructure services.

67% of CIOs and CTOs surveyed cite the need for increased infrastructure flexibility as driving the digital transformation, followed by the need for competitive advantage (61%), cost savings (58%), increasing globalization (54%) and meeting client demands (45%).

While the majority — 60% of CIOs and CTOs — surveyed say their company's IT modernization is not yet ready for the future, the study revealed significant differences in the US and UK markets. For example, while approximately 56% of US respondents say they are aggressively moving their IT infrastructure to hybrid cloud, only 38% of respondents in the UK describe their approach as aggressive.

And while 56% of CIOs/CTOs surveyed in the US say their IT infrastructures were completely prepared for the business changes brought on by COVID-19, only 23% of UK managers surveyed felt as prepared.

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Tech Leaders Unprepared for Future IT Needs

More than half (60%) of IT leaders say their company's IT modernization program is not yet ready for the future, according to a new IBM survey in the US and UK.

Nearly a quarter of CIOs and CTOs surveyed say their company is just starting its IT modernization journey or has yet to begin modernizing, with about a third surveyed saying they are still in the midst of transformation. 380 CIOs and CTOs participated in the survey, recently completed by The State of IT Transformation Study conducted by the Managed Infrastructure Services unit of IBM's Global Technology Services division.

As a result, more than 95% of IT leaders surveyed said they are looking to adopt public, hybrid or private cloud strategies. Of those, many are moving at an aggressive pace — the study reveals that 53% of respondents are aggressively pursuing a public cloud strategy, 48% a hybrid cloud strategy and 45% a private cloud strategy.

"Our clients are looking to accelerate IT modernization by leveraging cloud models — both public and hybrid, data, AI, automation and other key technologies to help shape, scale and manage more effectively massive, complex, global architectures," said Archana Vemulapalli, GM, IBM Infrastructure Services - Offerings and CTO. "In this rapidly changing digital business environment, organizations can bring in the right technology and the right partners to help aggregate, integrate, build and maintain a scalable digital business, while also enforcing effective governance."

The pressures on IT infrastructures brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have further accelerated the need for cloud infrastructure, professional skills development, and security upgrades, the survey found. More than 60% of technology leaders surveyed say they expect increased demand for cloud infrastructure to be permanent.

Even as IT leaders are feeling increased urgency to accelerate their organizations' transformation, migrating to a multi-cloud environment can present significant challenges to organizations with legacy applications running large data pools.

Adding to this, many surveyed technology leaders are not sure they have the right teams in place. A full 40% of survey respondents do not feel their teams have the right skills to fully meet their IT ambitions, and more than three in four surveyed say they will rely more on trusted partners that can provide managed infrastructure services.

67% of CIOs and CTOs surveyed cite the need for increased infrastructure flexibility as driving the digital transformation, followed by the need for competitive advantage (61%), cost savings (58%), increasing globalization (54%) and meeting client demands (45%).

While the majority — 60% of CIOs and CTOs — surveyed say their company's IT modernization is not yet ready for the future, the study revealed significant differences in the US and UK markets. For example, while approximately 56% of US respondents say they are aggressively moving their IT infrastructure to hybrid cloud, only 38% of respondents in the UK describe their approach as aggressive.

And while 56% of CIOs/CTOs surveyed in the US say their IT infrastructures were completely prepared for the business changes brought on by COVID-19, only 23% of UK managers surveyed felt as prepared.

The Latest

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...