Tech Leaders Unprepared for Future IT Needs
January 27, 2021
Share this

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.

Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2023

To achieve maximum availability, IT leaders must employ domain-agnostic solutions that identify and escalate issues across all telemetry points. These technologies, which we refer to as Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, create convergence — in other words, they provide IT and DevOps teams with the full picture of event management and downtime ...

March 23, 2023

APMdigest and leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) are partnering to bring you the EMA-APMdigest Podcast, a new podcast focused on the latest technologies impacting IT Operations. In Episode 2 - Part 1 Pete Goldin, Editor and Publisher of APMdigest, discusses Network Observability with Shamus McGillicuddy, Vice President of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA ...

March 22, 2023

CIOs have stepped into the role of digital leader and strategic advisor, according to the 2023 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis ...

March 21, 2023

Synthetic monitoring is crucial to deploy code with confidence as catching bugs with E2E tests on staging is becoming increasingly difficult. It isn't trivial to provide realistic staging systems, especially because today's apps are intertwined with many third-party APIs ...

March 20, 2023

Recent EMA field research found that ServiceOps is either an active effort or a formal initiative in 78% of the organizations represented by a global panel of 400+ IT leaders. It is relatively early but gaining momentum across industries and organizations of all sizes globally ...

March 16, 2023

Managing availability and performance within SAP environments has long been a challenge for IT teams. But as IT environments grow more complex and dynamic, and the speed of innovation in almost every industry continues to accelerate, this situation is becoming a whole lot worse ...

March 15, 2023

Harnessing the power of network-derived intelligence and insights is critical in detecting today's increasingly sophisticated security threats across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, according to a new research study from IDC ...

March 14, 2023

Recent research suggests that many organizations are paying for more software than they need. If organizations are looking to reduce IT spend, leaders should take a closer look at the tools being offered to employees, as not all software is essential ...

March 13, 2023

Organizations are challenged by tool sprawl and data source overload, according to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023, with 52% of respondents reporting that their companies use 6 or more observability tools, including 11% that use 16 or more.

March 09, 2023

An array of tools purport to maintain availability — the trick is sorting through the noise to find the right one. Let us discuss why availability is so important and then unpack the ROI of deploying Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) during an economic downturn ...